Illegal instruction, invalid keyfile

I am using full encryption. When I boot up it prompts me for the password.

Attempting to decrypt master key… Enter passphrase for hd1,gpt2 (122e17etc):

After entering it correctly it seems like it’s going to work, but on a new screen I get this message:

Illegal instruction
Invalid keyfile. Reverting to passphrase.

A password is required to access the luks-122e17etc volume:
Enter the passphrase for /dev/sda2:

It doesn’t seem to even matter what I enter, I’ve tried all of the passwords, as soon as I press the enter key, like literally immediately, it just says “Illegal instruction Enter passphrase for /dev/sda2:” again and again.

I upgraded and removed a kernel immediately before this started happening. I was running 5.13 or something and I kept running into issues. I didn’t really know what I was doing there, I just kept getting errors and that seemed to fix them. I think I’m running 6.6 or something along those lines now.

Hats off to people that encrypt their stuff without understanding what’s going on with their system. Luck always favours the brave. :smiley:

Anyway, boot iso, decrypt mount it manually, chroot and something.

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Full disk encryption is a basic feature that every user should be using, even users that don’t really know how it works.

For actual help with your problem, you could start with giving basic system information
inxi -Fazy
for instance
(there are easy to find suggestions in the forum on how to provide information)

I disagree.
If the user doesn’t know how it works and what to do in case of problems
it can do more harm than good
(total loss of data, because of the user being incapable of using the means to access their data
or think: no passphrase - and lost or corrupted key file - that means: the game is definitely over)

In that case it is just a bold move that doesn’t always end well, like @zbe said.

Try using a different kernel or the one you had before.

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