[arch-general] can't unlock a luks encrypted partition. (urgent).

[Hussam Al-Tayeb]

On Sat, 2009-10-10 at 01:45 +0200, Heiko Baums wrote:
> Am Sat, 10 Oct 2009 02:15:35 +0300
> schrieb Hussam Al-Tayeb <ht990332 at gmail.com>:
> 
> > my root partition passphrase (arch asks for at initramfs stage) always
> > works and it accepts it correctly.
> > This issue happens when you try to unlock a partition later on.
> > This means that if you don't have an encrypted /home on a different
> > partition, you won't see this problem.
> 
> Just another thought. I know that this is also pretty improbable.
> 
> I don't know the filesystem of your / partition. Can this be an issue
> with ext4 in kernel 2.6.31 and LUKS?
> 
> Have you checked your harddisk with smartctl, badblocks or something
> similar? Maybe it is indeed dying. Of course it's also improbable if
> this issue appeared only after upgrading from kernel 2.6.30 to 2.6.31
> but maybe worth a try.
> 
> Otherwise I don't have any other ideas.
> 
> Heiko

I did a fsck and badblocks. nothing wrong there. 
I don't think it is failing because cryptsetup on an old opensuse live
cd successfully unlocks /dev/sdb1 eventhough it doesn't support ext4.

I'm reading manpage for smarctl and will run a test and post results.