Boot fails with padlock-aes message

[jowyta]

I recently installed Stretch on a HP Pavilion 14-bk064sa, set up with disk encryption. All was going well except that it was hanging on shutdown. It seemed that this was likely to be the problem: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo ... bug=782837 so we went into aptitude to install x11-xserver-utils . There was also a security update for one other package.

Amongst the install message was one to the effect that we would not be able to "boot with this initramfs". Unfortunately we did not take too much notice of this, apart from backing up to another computer. And now the computer will not boot. It fails with the message:

Code: Select all

couldn't load /padlock-aes.ko; no such device

I cannot find any recent references to problems involving padlock-aes, I cannot see what we might have done to initiate any changes in the initramfs and I cannot find the failure message in any source code.

Does anyone have any idea what would have changed to cause this to happen? And any way of getting the computer to boot without using the installer (not easy since the computer is a friend's who lives a hundred miles away).

John

[debiman]

Amongst the install message was one to the effect that we would not be able to "boot with this initramfs".

this seems pretty clear to me.
it would have been prudent to read the whole message and act upon it before rebooting.

i'm not sure if the initramfs is on the encrypted part of the drive or not.
if not, maybe you can somehow create one that will allow you to boot.

[jowyta]

Amongst the install message was one to the effect that we would not be able to "boot with this initramfs".

this seems pretty clear to me.
it would have been prudent to read the whole message and act upon it before rebooting.

You could assume that I am painfully aware of that. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I don't think the message had anything useful to say about what to do.

I certainly was not expecting that we could end up with a boot problem after installing one package and security updating another in a Debian stable installation. I am hoping that someone who has some in depth understanding of the system can suggest how this problem with the initramfs and padlock-aes came about.

i'm not sure if the initramfs is on the encrypted part of the drive or not.
if not, maybe you can somehow create one that will allow you to boot.

The EFI and boot (with the initramfs) partitions are not encrypted. Do you know how to create an initramfs on an unbootable system?

John