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Is there a way to do full disk encryption after the install?

I have Ubuntu 11.10 installed with /home encrypted but really need the whole drive encrypted. I would really like to do that with out a re-install. Is there anyway to do that?

Braiam
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Jet
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2 Answers2

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LUKS in-place encryption exists. But you need to set up your environment a little as per the pictures:

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(Also see this question)

Community
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Frederick Nord
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  • Thanks for the answer. It seems the Lukispc author recommends cryptsetup-reencrypt but that requires UEFI; https://github.com/johndoe31415/luksipc – gimmegimme Oct 14 '22 at 02:41
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No. Part of full disk encryption, Truecrypt or otherwise, is writing random data to the hard drive.

Best you could do (without a re-install) would be to migrate your home to encryption or make a encrypted data partition. You could use Truecrypt or LUKS (I personally use LUKS).

Panther
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    "writing random data to the hard drive" - this is totally optional and not the root cause for marking this not possible. One could change the initramfs configuration, crypttab, fstab, make a separate /boot partition, copy everything over to a new encrypted volume. It's hard, though. I would re-install everything copy data back as well. – gertvdijk Dec 18 '12 at 12:16
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    This answer is not correct. You would indeed want to write-over existing data with encrypted (or random) data, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to encrypt a drive in-place. Plenty of operating systems do it and LUKS supports in-place encryption. – Ken Kinder Mar 25 '20 at 15:10