Chapter 7. Booting Into Your New Ubuntu System 7.1. The Moment of Truth 7.2. Mounting encrypted volumes 7.2.1. Troubleshooting 71 If some of the encrypted volumes could not be mounted because a wrong passphrase was entered, you will have to mount them manually after the boot. There are several cases. After entering all passphrases the boot should continue as usual. No characters (even asterisks) will be shown while entering the passphrase. If you enter the wrong passphrase, you have two more tries to correct it. After the third try the boot process will skip this volume and continue to mount the next filesystem. Please see Section 7.2.1 for further information. Begin: Mounting root file system ... ... Begin: Running /scripts/local-top ... Enter LUKS passphrase: In the first line of the prompt, part is the name of the underlying partition, e.g. sda2 or md0. You are now probably wondering for which volume you are actually entering the passphrase. Does it relate to your /home ? Or to /var ? Of course, if you have just one encrypted volume, this is easy and you can just enter the passphrase you used when setting up this volume. If you set up more than one encrypted volume during the installation, the notes you wrote down as the last step in Section 6.3.3.6 come in handy. If you did not make a note of the mapping between part _crypt and the mount points before, you can still find it in /etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab of your new system. The prompt may look somewhat different when an encrypted root file system is mounted. This de- pends on which initramfs generator was used to generate the initrd used to boot the system. The example below is for an initrd generated using initramfs-tools : Starting early crypto disks... part _crypt(starting) Enter LUKS passphrase: If you created encrypted volumes during the installation and assigned them mount points, you will be asked to enter the passphrase for each of these volumes during the boot. For partitions encrypted using dm-crypt you will be shown the following prompt during the boot: Your system’s first boot on its own power is what electrical engineers call the “smoke test”. If the system fails to start up correctly, don’t panic. If the installation was successful, chances are good that there is only a relatively minor problem that is preventing the system from booting Ubuntu. In most cases such problems can be fixed without having to repeat the installation. One available option to fix boot problems is to use the installer’s built-in rescue mode (see Section 8.7).