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MY laptop ran out of power last night and when i turned it on today it boot loops into initramfs ash prompt. Trying to load an old kernel or into recovery mode has the same effect. The issue here also shows in recovery mode "Failed to connect to lvmetad. Falling back to internal scanning" and this will continue over and over.

I have my drives encrypted as luks lvm. I can not get into absolutely anything.

Trying ubuntu 18 and 20 livedisks I try to access the drives. But fdisk, df, gparted etc do not list them. The only /dev/sda device listed is the usb device i have plugged in. I cannot mount this luks container because i can't find it, and it doesnt seem to exist!

I recall i think my root partition was on /dev/sda3 but if i were to try to open it with cryptsetup it would say it doesn't exist. And well, since i can't find the partitions anywhere, it seems like it. There is no dual booting, this laptop is full disk encrypted with ubuntu.

Ubuntu just ruined my day. I've been searching similar topics for hours but none had the issue of the partitions being unavailable. Please help

tjayd
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  • Possible: https://askubuntu.com/questions/745218/ubuntu-wont-boot-because-of-lvmetad – Terrance Dec 08 '20 at 18:07
  • Those solutions don't seem to work because i can't get a root shell in recovery mode, plus I can't find access to the drives at ALL on live cd. Can't luksmount a partition that doesn't exist :(. – tjayd Dec 08 '20 at 18:20
  • Try Boot Repair as you should be able to run it from a LiveCD, there are steps in there explaining how to do it. It will also allow you to upload the log from it so that maybe we can take a look at it and it might help explain more of what is going on. You might have a corrupted or defective hard drive, but it is hard to say. – Terrance Dec 08 '20 at 18:44
  • I'll try that out thanks. Also I'm thinking the reason my drives arent listed on the live usb ubuntu is because they are in raid mode. I would switch to ahci sata in bios but I'm afraid I will lose my data – tjayd Dec 08 '20 at 18:54
  • My understanding on that is when you switch from RAID to AHCI mode is that Windows will no longer boot (if installed) but Ubuntu would still boot. Always best to have a backup, but when you can't access your drives, that is pretty hard. I am thinking that your drive might have been in AHCI and your battery loss caused it to move to RAID. But, you did mention that your drives are in RAID mode, so that may not be wise to change. – Terrance Dec 08 '20 at 19:07
  • Tried out the tool. Found nothing, didn't detect the drives again. So i rolled the dice and switched from RAID to AHCI sata mode in bios and it's now all working again. I think ubuntu somehow remapped my nvme drives to only be viewable on ahci settings. Which is pretty ridiculous! I had previously never tampered with bios settings on this machine so i don't know if it was always on raid or not. Anyway it's solved now. Thank you for the help. – tjayd Dec 08 '20 at 19:26
  • Glad you got it fixed! =) – Terrance Dec 08 '20 at 19:30

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Change the SATA settings in the BIOS setup utility from RAID mode to AHCI mode.

karel
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