Upgrading Mageia 4 to 5 with encrypted / (root) partition

[merlin]

I have a Dell Laptop that is currently running Mageia 4 and it is using an encrypted / (root) partition and a separate non-encrypted /boot partition. Legacy mode BIOS is being used although the hardware supports UEFI.

I have created a USB stick with the Mageia 5 64-bit x86 install / upgrade ISO image. I booted the USB stick on the Laptop with the intention of performing an upgrade but it seems that the root partition is not accessible as it is encrypted. Therefore, the installation goes for a fresh install rather than an upgrade. I turned off the Laptop at this point to prevent deletion of Mageia 4.

Does anyone have any suggestions for entering the passphrase to decrypt the / (root) partition so that an upgrade to Mageia 5 takes place ?

Alternately, would a Live Update in Mageia 4 via the GUI tool be recommended as the / (root) partition would be accessible as it is in a decrypted state ?

An additional headache is that the Laptop has 2 graphics cards; Intel for the LCD screen and nVidia for an external HDMI monitor. In Mageia 4, I had to maintain 2 separate xorg.conf files so that I could switch the files to use the Laptop's LCD screen or the external HDMI monitor. I suspect Mageia 5 will also have this issue according to the errata pages.

Thanks.

[doktor5000]

I'd suggest to simply boot your Mageia 4 installation as usual, install all Mageia 4 updates.
And then continue via https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_5_Rel ... _.28CLI.29

If you want to upgrade via the installation media you prepared, you would need to manually open your encrypted filesystem.
Should be as easy as switching to a tty once the installer has loaded via Ctrl+Alt+F2 but I'm not sure the necessary tools (at least cryptsetup and mount) are available from there directly.
In theory the only bit that should be needed is to open the encrypted partition via

Code: Select all

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda5 test

where /dev/sda5 is your encrypted / partition and test is just a arbitrary string used to setup the /dev/mapper/ hierarchy ...

But I'm not sure anybody actually tested this before, jsut guessing. If you really want to know, I could try to reproduce this in a VM.

[jiml8]

Cryptsetup is available on the installation media. Doktor's description should work fine.