encrypted partition

Once you have decided to encrypt your hard drive, you might find yourself in the situation where you need to pull off data from it when the regular decryption mechanisms you use are not in place. E.g. when the OS is not booting or the drive has some physical problems. In that case you need to boot from a CD/DVD that supports the encryption technology that you used. In my case I need a live Ubuntu CD/DVD, preferably the same version that was used to encrypt the disk! Otherwise there might be incompatibilities:
sudo apt-get install lvm2 cryptsetup


I have one encrypted partition that was created under SuSE 9.2. After a fresh install of 9.3 (not an update) the mounting of that partition during bootup failed. I could, however, still mount it manually later using another loopdevice. To fix this, I had to change the encryption algorithm in /etc/cryptotab from twofish256 to twofishSL92. More detailed information.

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