Dear Maintainer,
*** Please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?
                reinstalled my system but was unable to keep home on my
existing encrypted partition
   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
                tried to mount the partition on tty2 but didn't know how to and
wasn't sure if the installer would detect it any way
   * What was the outcome of this action?
                didn't try
   * What outcome did you expect instead?
                when in get to partitioning o n the installer it to say,
"existing encrypted partition detected, do you wish to mount it"

Hi!
This is a feature I would really love to see. Currently, there is no
easy way to use an existing encrypted partition in a new install.
You should be able to tell the debian installer which partition is
encrypted and provide password to unlock it. You should then be able to
use it in your new install.

Just like the original poster, I like to encrypt my /home partition. I
would like to be able to reinstall debian without having to overwrite it
or mount it myself after the install.

Hi there,

I would like to see such a feature, too. There are two situations when
it's usefull. Since I found a way dealing with it

1. Some time ago I killed my initrd during an update and had to repair
my encrypted LVM system. D-I helped repairing it in rescue mode:

- Booting D-I (Wheezy, testing around april 2012) in Rescue-Mode
- IIRC D-I allowed to enter the passphrase for the encrypted LVM
- choosed root-partition
- opened tty2:
- mount /boot
- mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-rescue 3.2.0-2-amd64
- exit and reboot
- during startup I had to change the initrd (grub).
  This could be repaired by updating grub in the running system.

2. I now would like to install jessie as a second OS. I want it to live
in a seperate volume of my existing encrypted LVM, but D-I (from end October 2013) is not able
to recognize it automatically.
I found an older tutorial (german language) for a workaround at
http://blog.stefan-betz.net/2009/1/6/debian-installer-mit-bereits-vorhandenem-verschluesseltem-lvm-verwenden/

It says:
- boot D-I as usual
- after setting up networking (in partitioing menu) go back to main menu

- open tty2 (ALT+F2) and enter the following commands:
  depmod -a
  modprobe dm-mod
  modprobe dm-snapshot
  cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 sda2_crypt
  vgchange -a y
...

But here is the point it doesn't work:
cryptsetup: command not found.
I tried to load the components via the d-i menu, but this doesn't work,
too. Modules are loadable but I can't find crytpsetup itself.
Of course there is a way to work around it, but my abilities comes to
its limits and it seems to be less painfull using debootstrap.

So: it would be (very) nice to have it officially supported in d-i.

Christian Meyer

I recently had a Debian 12 (bookworm) fail somewhere in the boot
process. The EFI firmware didn't recognize the nvme device. However,
the d-i netinst not only recognized the device, but recognized the
encrypted partition on it, and the LVM PV in the encrypted partition.
After I gave it the password for the encrypted partition, it made the
LVs available to me, and I was able to chroot into the system.

So it looks like everything you need to open an encrypted partition and
PV within that already exists on the d-i installer. Alas, they are not
available in partman when installing. Instead I installed Debian 13
(trixie), and spent most of two days restoring programs and data.

This line from syslog might be a hint:

Sep 10 16:08:05 main-menu[464]: (process:6666):
/lib/partman/active_partition/86opal_factory_reset/choices: line 8:
/sbin/cryptsetup: not found

Does anyone object to merging #660191 and #907955 with #451535 and others ?

<https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=451535>
<https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=#660191>
<https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=907955>

Hi,

Am 18. Januar 2026 12:38:30 MEZ schrieb Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org>:

No, feel free to do so.


Holger