Rescuing an Encrypted Pop!_OS 22.04 Installation

I wanted to access my encrypted Pop!_OS installation from a rescue environment.  I was ultimately successful, and this is how things unfolded.  Any or all of this information may be specific to version 22.04, or even 22.04 as it stands in July 2022.  Nonetheless…

I booted with SystemRescue.  At least as of version 9.03, if you want to change the keymap, read everything first because the UI erases the screen irretrievably (the console does not have scrollback.)

With that out of the way, I was kind of at a loss as to how to proceed.  I could fdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1 and determine that nvme0n1p3 was my root volume.  I tried mounting it with -t auto, to see if that could chain together everything on its own, but it simply failed with an error: mount: unknown filesystem type 'crypto_LUKS'

The command to decrypt it is fairly straightforward.  The final name appears to be arbitrary.  (Although the help/error seemed to indicate that it is optional, a name is definitely required.)

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p3 cryptodisk

Now, that created /dev/mapper/cryptodisk, but I couldn’t mount that; it was some sort of LVM type.  Ah.  I searched the web again, and arrived at the commands:

vgscan
vgchange -ay

These found the volume groups and brought them online, where they could be examined with vgs to get the group names, and lvs to get the volume names. As it turned out, there’s only one of each.  The VG was named data and the volume within it was named root, which makes the final command:

mount -t ext4 /dev/data/root /mnt

Had it not been inside LVM, the vg* commands would have been unnecessary, and I could have mounted it with something like mount -t ext4 /dev/mapper/cryptodisk /mnt (with “cryptodisk” being the name I gave it during the cryptsetup luksOpen command.)