Manually creating an encrypted partition without yast2 (fdisk, mkreiserfs, losetup, twofish, cryptotab)

There is an article in the knowledge base, but here in short:

  • Create the partition using fdisk or cfdisk (here sda1)
  • losetup -e twofish256 /dev/loop0 /dev/sda1
  • Type in the password for the encryption. It should be quite long in order to be safe.
  • Create the filesystem with mkreiserfs /dev/loop0
  • Mount the partition: mount -t reiserfs /dev/loop0 /media/cryptpart
  • Put the entries into /etc/cryptotab: /dev/loop0 /dev/sda1 /media/cryptpart reiserfs twofish256 defaults