Backtrack 5 persistent USB - /dev/mapper/vg-root does not exsist. Dropping to a shell.
Recently I've installed Backtrack on my USB drive according to the great tutorial on Infosec Ramblinks. I have done this for thousand times before but this time something went bad. After few uses of my USB I suddenly couldnt boot my flashdrive with this message:
Alert! /dev/mapper/vg-root does not exsist. Dropping to a shell.
I couldn't google much except seeing people's comments on Infosec Ramblinks. Basically everybody suggested to run live cd, chroot, install lvm2 and hashalot once again. I tried but it didnt help at all. So I took a deeper look where the problem is.
The error message says that I fails to find vg-root which is your partition after decryption. Decryption is done by cryptsetup. If you browse the initramfs a bit you will find out that there isn't any. Thats the reason why the decryption fails.
So I booted live cd, chrooted etc and installed cryptsetup separately.
apt-get install cryptsetup
Its pretty much possible that it got lost during some system update or whatever. Dunno. However after installation it updates your initramfs automatically so you dont have to do it manually. Just reboot and tell me if it helped you.
Step-by-step
1) follow Troubleshooting part of original tutorial
2) When you are done, install cryptsetup:
apt-get install cryptsetup
3) reboot and boot your USB
You dont need to change your password or create new. It will just add application which used for decrpytion of your device and its somehow missing in the system.
