[Solved] Clone existing arch system onto dm-crypt encrypted volume

Question

Hi all,
I've been playing around with full disk encryption using dm-crypt and luks, and have it working pretty well on a spare harddrive. I don't want to go through the process of re-customizing a full install again, so I was wondering if it's possible to clone my / partition from my current install to an encrypted disk?
My end goal is to have my /boot partition on a USB thumb drive and a giant encrypted volume for the rest of the / partition (including /home).
My current drive has a / partition and a separate /home partition.
I'm imagining something like this:
Set up the whole new drive as an encrypted volume, unlock it with cryptsetup and map it to /dev/mapper/root
dd if=/dev/myOldDisk/rootPartition of=/dev/mapper/root
delete the encrypted /boot (it came over from OldDisk but I don't want it on the new encrypted disk).
Copy files from old home to encrypted disk's /home folder.
Would that work? Or am I better off just copying files over from my old / folder rather than using dd?
I appreciate any input you've got!
-Lefty
Last edited by LeftyAce (2014-01-06 22:41:14)

Answer 1

LeftyAce wrote:Set up the whole new drive as an encrypted volume, unlock it with cryptsetup and map it to /dev/mapper/root
dd if=/dev/myOldDisk/rootPartition of=/dev/mapper/root
+1 to dodo3773's suggestion to use rsync, the above dd would create garbage anyway. You could dd an encrypted partition to another empty one (on the new drive), but creating and mapping a new encrypted volume first will result in a fresh encryption key. The garbage occurs since your command clones encrypted bytes incl. the old encryption header to a transparent (non-encrypted) mapper. A bit more info here.