Re: Dracut fails to boot root-fs

Michael <[email protected]> Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:49:21 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.gentoo.user
Message-ID	<5986410.DvuYhMxLoT@rogueboard>
On Saturday, 11 April 2026 00:49:56 British Summer Time Carsten Hauck 
wrote:
> Dear list,
> Gentoo has been my distribution of choice for more than 20 years, I
> borked my systems more than once but always found a solution
> eventually. Not so now.
> Some time ago I aquired a refurbished Gen. 3 HP ZBook as a replacement
> for my Very Old Laptop. I installed Gentoo following the handbook and
> the relevant wikipages covering LVM and encryption of the root
> filesystem. It failed to boot. As I couldn't figure out what I had
> done wrong I installed Devuan to be sure not to have a hardware
> issue. That booted perfectly fine. So I did a complete reinstall on
> the partitions left over from Devuan. An efi-partition, a
> boot-partition and a big LUKS-encryptet partition with a swap and a
> root vg.
> Again, I could not boot the root fs.
> After meddling for a while without success I figured, that I am just
> too dumb for LVM and that my thread model allows for unencryptet
> swap. Again I did a complete reinstall after repartitioning, this
> time without using LVM.  The problem persists.
> 
> The installation went smoothly and the chroot works as expected. I use
> GRUB as bootmanager and sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin to rule out
> configuration issues. GRUB loads the kernel without problem and I am
> prompted for the luksOpen passphrase. After entering the correct
> passphrase nothing happens for several minutes until I am dropped
> into a dracut rescue shell.
> It states:
> dracut Warning: Could not boot.
> dracut Warning: /dev/disk/by-uuid/73afXXX does not exist

Did you install 'sys-fs/cryptsetup' before creating the initramfs with 
dracut?

What modules have you added in /etc/dracut.conf?


> I can mount and access the root filesystem (/dev/mapper/cryptroot)
> without problem but even after mounting it on /sysroot and exiting the
> shell it fails to boot and drops me right back into the shell.
> 
> dracut:/# blkid
> /dev/nvme0n1p3: UUID="66b9XXX" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="7f17XXX"
> /dev/nvme0n1p1: UUID="C900XXX" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat"
> PARTUUID="9f76XXX"
> /dev/nvme0n1p4: UUID="332dXXX" TYPE="crypto_LUKS" PARTUUID="52a0XXX"
> /dev/nvme0n1p2: LABEL:"boot" UUID="aef0XXX" BLOCK_SIZE="4096"
> TYPE="ext2" PARTUUID="c457XXX"
> /dev/mapper/cryptroot: LABEL="root" UUID"73afXXX" BLOCK_SIZE="512"
> TYPE="xfs"
> 
> dracut:/# cat /proc/cmdline
> BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-6.18.18-gentoo-dist root=UUID=73afXXX ro
> rd.lang=de rd.vconsole.keymap=de-latin1
> rd.luks.name=332dXXX=cryptroot
> 
> I tried to modifie the GRUB commandline to access the root filesystem
> by LABEL or by /dev/mapper/cryptroot with the same effect.
> Everything seems to work: GRUB, the initramfs, cryptsetup... so I
> don't have an idea what's going wrong. Only thing is, there is no
> entry for /dev/mapper/crypt 

I think you meant to write: "/dev/mapper/cryptroot"

> in /dev/disk/by-uuid and in
> /dev/disk/by-label.
> 
> Anyone pointing me to the Obvious and Stupid mistake I'm making (or
> giving me other meaningfull advice) would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Kind regards
> 
> Carsten
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