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Troubleshooting with a Live USB

Technicians in the field can eliminate local linux installation issues by booting the system into a Live USB environment. This can allow technicians to verify networking, do hardware tests, backup or recover data, and do other testing.

Creating a Live USB stick​

  1. Download the ubuntu desktop ISO: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
  2. Use your favorite tool to 'burn' the ISO on to a USB flash drive. Popular options are Balena Etcher and Rufus.

Booting the system from the Live USB​

Plug the Live USB stick in to a USB port that is directly on the system's motherboard. External USB hubs and front-panel USB ports are not reliable for this purpose.

When the system first powers on, you can either press the keyboard key to initiate a one-time boot menu selector or you can go into the BIOS/UEFI configuration and change the boot order.

Decrypt the local hard disk​

You will need to get the decryption keys from the Linux Infrastructure team. You can ask them on the Linux Escalation teams channel for your unit or you can open a ticket and assign it to TS-AO-Linux-Infrastructure.

When you have the key(s), unlock the disks using this procedure:

  • From the Ubuntu Live USB desktop, open a Terminal window.
  • Run sudo fdisk -l to see a list of all disk partitions
  • Identify the disk partition you need to decrypt.
  • Run sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/blah my_drive where /dev/blah is the partition you need to unlock
  • Activate LVM if necessary: sudo vgchange -ay
  • Mount the volume: sudo mount /dev/mapper/your-volume-group-partition /mnt