[Tfug] Encrypting the WHOLE DISK - practical?

[Dennis McCormick]

On 4/13/07, Jim March <1.jim.march at gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> My laptop only has a 60gig HD.  It's split now into 57gig boot and working,
> 2gig swap.
>
> I've tried to split off /home into another partition but, I can never really
> be sure how much data vs. programs I'm going to be playing with.
>
> Now I've got a bit of a crisis: I've been hired to go onsite to another
> state and investigate a group of scammers.  Long story I won't go into but
> the possibility my laptop will be taken is moderately high.  I need a simple
> method of doing whole-disk encryption.
>
> Plus somebody else doing election oversight just got burgled of a single
> thing: her laptop's hard drive.  Which was replaced with another, similar
> drive, although blank.  Wrong brand though.
>
> My main partition is now Ext3.  If I have to reformat in XFS or something I
> will, but...I need to do something quick here.
>
> Tips?
>
> Oh yeah, I'm running Ubuntu Feisty Beta right now.  (GREAT stuff by the
> way!)
>
> Jim
> _______________________________________________

Is there any possibility of adding an external USB hard drive with
Debian 4 installed? It would be more straightforward if the BIOS
allows booting from that external drive otherwise GRUB may be set to
dual-boot.

I just did a test install on an internal IDE drive in which one of the
choices was Encryption, resulting in almost whole-disk encryption
using LVS. A small, unencrypted ext3 /boot partition was placed on the
disk.

The USB drive could possibly be stored in a secure location when not in use.

Dennis McCormick