Unable to Encrypt Drive

[Robinson]

I'm attempting to install Backtrack 4 R2 for the first time on my USB drive with encryption following the tutorial in the "How To" section.

This is my input:
root@bt:~# cryptsetup -y --cipher aes-xts-plain --key-size 512 luksFormat /dev/sdb5

And I receive this output:
WARNING!
========
This will overwrite data on /dev/sdb5 irrevocably.

Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES
Command failed: Can not access device

How can I allow it to access the device? Or what have I done wrong?

[Barry]

Why are there at least 5 partitions on your drive?

[Robinson]

I simply followed the instructions that were provided. I take it by your response, however, that I must have made a mistake somewhere?

[KMDave]

Well you should have some basic knowledge about partitioning schemes under Linux before running a command like that.
Also thinking about what you are executing helps a lot to prevent deleting a partition with data on it you do not intend to delete.
And yes that happened to me as well, so it is a piece of advice from my own experience

[Barry]

Well you should have some basic knowledge about partitioning schemes under Linux before running a command like that.
Also thinking about what you are executing helps a lot to prevent deleting a partition with data on it you do not intend to delete.
And yes that happened to me as well, so it is a piece of advice from my own experience

What he said!! ^^^


If there is already data on the drive, then I can kinda understand trying to encrypt sda5, but man, that's a lot of partitions. On my two systems that are full disk encrypted, there are only two partitions, though neither are external drives, the partitioning should be the same. Sda1 is /boot and sda2 is / . /boot is not encrypted, and / is. Maybe if you gave us an idea of the drive's partitioning scheme, we can give you a push in the right direction.

[KMDave]

You might wan to try a

fdisk -l

and see which partitions you have