Librem Mini v2 Qubes OS pre install came PASSWORD protected

Hardware Librem Mini
1

Qubes OS on initial bootup asked me for a passphrase. How do I get past this or is it even supposed to come like this?

Kind regards to anyone that can help.

2

Many Purism products have a default password of 123456. Does that work?

3

It did not work, just keeps asking for a new passphrase for the SSD.

4

Is it asking you to set a passphrase or asking to provide a passphrase to unlock the disk?

5

When I boot up it will go to the qubes screen with the option of entering a Disk Password. When I press ESC it says “Please enter passphrase for disk xxxxxxxx” At the top it says Failed to load Kernal Modules but everything else is OK.

6

Alright, not sure then. You can email support@puri.sm

7

How sketchy man, jeeeez been waiting to order from these folks for months and now this. Trust broken from start.

1 Like
8

That sounds like prompting for the Luke (full disk encryption) passphrase. It wouldn’t make sense to ship something like qubes on an unencrypted disk. I don’t know what the default passphrase would be, but would agree that contacting support for … well support would be a good first step.

I’m not sure how encrypting the drive during the OS install would decrease trust, and if having a pre-configured luks passphrase is cause for lack of trust then the plan should have been to install your own OS from the beginning…

9

If I can’t get Purism to reply and resolve this, the only next step would be to purchase and replace the m.2 ssd it came with and go from there? Im assuming I can not re load qubes os without getting passed the passphrase? Am I seeing this correctly?

10

No.

All you would do is download the latest iso I believe technically in beta, been a minute since I checked, then boot off a USB that you loaded the content of the iso to and install.

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11

I booted from a USB and it brought me to the qubes os install screen and gave me the option to re claim my SSD. It looks like there is LUKS encryption set so without the password i wont be able to access it the normal way. If its allowing me to re claim and delete this then it should be normal as the initial install? Am I seeing this correctly this time?

Everyone’s reply is very much appreciated.

12

If you reinstall off the USB drive it’ll wipe your ssd and reinstall qubes. It’s your OS that’s locked, not the physical ssd itself. Just the data on it.

3 Likes
13

How stupid is this then to sell the hardware with qubes OS pre-installed and even asking for this and then you have to do it for yourself anyways?
I don’t get it.
What a strange Company…

1 Like
14

So I ran into this same problem and this solution does not work. Have a LIbrem Mini v2 with SeaBIOS and Qubes OS. When I initially went through the Qubes OS setup I set a password for my user and I logged into the machine a couple of times and it seemed to be working. Then I shutdown the machine and the next time I booted it up was about a month later and it asked for the disk passphrase. Don’t remember setting a disk passphrase. At any rate, I am locked out. So I grabbed the latest Qubes OS iso and when I try to select that from the boot menu the GRUB loading message comes up and then I get the message “error: failure reading sector 0x15fc from ‘hd0’” and it drops me into grub rescue.

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15

If you went through the Qubes OS OEM installation procedure, there is no disk password, so simply press Enter/Return.

Otherwise, try using a different USB port.

16

Thanks for the quick reply. If I try to boot to Qubes OS as it is installed I get the prompt for the disk password. To be exact:
“Please enter passphrase for disk Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 250GB (luks-…)::”
Hitting Return/Enter is not excepted. It keeps prompting. If I attempt to boot to the Qubes OS image on USB that fails with the message above after it attempts to load GRUB

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17

Okay, try using a PureOS image on a USB drive instead. You will need a different computer to create the installation media.

Download PureOS

If you can boot into that, you should be able to redownload Qubes, rewrite the image onto a different USB drive using balenaEtcher, and boot into it.

18

Just grabbed the Pure OS image and flashed to a USB using Etcher. The I boot to the USB and when I select “Test or install PureOS” it sits at the PureOS splash screen for a while and then I get:

CHS: Error 0c00 reading sector 3433958 (213/192/18)
EDD: Error 0c00 reading sector 3433958

Then it reboots

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19

Definitely unusual. @jonathon.hall

It is possible that the USB drive is faulty, so you may want to try a different one in the meantime.

20

Agree, most likely a faulty USB flash drive, please try a different flash drive.

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