Failed to install Kali on encryped HDD

[jack0m]

Hi,
I tried to install Kali on an encryped HDD with both grub and boot partition on an external USB drive, but I got a I/O message during grub setup on the USB drive's MBR.
Then, on first reboot the system stopped at grub prompt and I tried to manually load and boot the linux kernel and initrd, but I got a kernel panic.
So after booting the live disk and manually mounting the encrypted partition, I found the /etc/crypttab file was empty. I then added the line:

sdax_crypt /dev/disk/by-uuid/[...] none luks
and did update-initramfs, and still no password prompt appears during boot to decrypt the HDD partition. The boot process now fails and I get back to initramfs prompt.
How can I fix my initramfs and correctly update grub?
Many thanks

EDIT: apparently, the issue was due to the following line in the /etc/boot/grub file:


GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="initrd=/install/gtk/initrd.gz"

I commented out that line and relaunched update-initramfs -u: the password prompt now appears on boot and the root partition can be successfully decrypted

[sickn3ss]

Have you followed the official documentation: http://docs.kali.org/installation/kali-linux-encrypted-disk-install ?

[jack0m]

Have you followed the official documentation: http://docs.kali.org/installation/kali-linux-encrypted-disk-install ?

I did, but that doesn't apply 100%, as I was trying to install the root partition on the internal HDD and grub + boot partition on the external USB drive. Moreover, the encrypted partition was already on the HDD, as it was previously used for a BackTrack 5 installation.

[Brocksampson]

I did, but that doesn't apply 100%, as I was trying to install the root partition on the internal HDD and grub + boot partition on the external USB drive. Moreover, the encrypted partition was already on the HDD, as it was previously used for a BackTrack 5 installation.

I have the exact same issue. I've tried everything I'm used to doing in extreme cases like this (DD, gparted, fdisk, deleting the mbr, LVM, etc) nothing seems to work.

Hardware - Dell E6230 laptop, 16gb ram, liteon 256 ssd

First installation of Kali was going well, seemed to complete ok (very straight forward). but when it went to reboot it failed to find the hard drive on post. Booting off of a BT5 or Kali live drive shows the hard drive as there, it can be mounted or unmounted as one would expect. Trying to delete the drive in anyway simply fails to produce the desired results. I literally did a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M and although it showed as completed with no errors, that didn't work. Trying to re-install BT5, Kali or even Windows 8 fails to format the drive now.

[Brocksampson]

Oddly enough my issue has been resolved by going in and deleting the /dev/mapper/[logical disks]. Not sure why that would have worked, or why it they would have kept me from installing another OS but deleting them did work. I'd say do this as a last resort of course, as it was the last thing I hadn't tried up to this point I figured I couldn't hurt anything else.