What is the ssd passphrase

Hi all, I have a librem 15v4. I bought it with the cheaper 250G SATA SSD and replaced it with a faster NVME SSD and a regular 3.5 inch SSD.

I recently bought a Raspberry pi 4 and wanted to use the SATA SSD that came with the Librem in a SSD enclosure with the RPi4. I wanted to try out a few ARM distro’s and run one off of the SSD.

How do I find the passphrase for the SSD?

I’m not an expert for that disk encryption stuff.

Do you need data that’s stored on the SSD or is it okay if those data get deleted?

If you don’t need that data can’t you simply reformat existing partions or reparation this SSD either

  • during an OS installer or
  • by booting some OS and use a tool like gparted?

Edit: data on formatted partitions or the disk as whole will be lost.

The first question would be: Were you using LUKS (or some other disk encryption) when the SSD was in the Librem?

If so, best case, whatever passphrase you were using previously should still work.

However, as @prolog says, if you don’t need what’s on the SSD then just nuke it.

I would be careful about attempting to install ARM distros on the existing SSD, since whatever is currently on there is presumably to boot x86 distros - and I don’t know how compatible the boot environment is anyway between PureOS (if that’s what is currently on there) and random ARM distros that will work on the Pi.

So I think that too says: just nuke it.

As it is in an enclosure, you should be able to plug it in to the Librem 15 and use gparted to create a new empty partition table on the SSD and start again. As always with gparted, make sure that you are operating on the correct disk / partition. Always be careful.