Chainloading Truecrypt

I recently purchased a new laptop computer (a Lenovo Thinkpad T520), and wanted to configure it to dual-boot between Windows and Linux.  Since this machine is to be used “on the go”, I also wanted to have full encryption of any operating systems on the device. My choices of tools for this are Truecrypt on the Windows side, and dm_crypt with LUKS on Linux. Mainly due to rather troublesome design on the Windows side of this setup, it was not as easy as I might have hoped. I did eventually get it working, however.

Admonishment

Truecrypt was https://www.grc.com/misc/truecrypt/truecrypt.htm in 2014, but still works okay. VeraCrypt is substantially a drop-in replacement if you’re looking for a piece of software that is still actively maintained. As of this update (early 2017) the only non-commercial option for an encrypted Windows system booted from UEFI is Windows’ native BitLocker (with which dual-booting is possible but it won’t be possible to read the encrypted Windows partition from Linux), but if you’re booting via legacy BIOS these instructions should still work for TrueCrypt or VeraCrypt.

Windows

Installing Windows on the machine was easy enough, following the usual installation procedure. I created a new partition to install Windows to filling half of the disk, and let it do its thing. Downloading and installing Truecrypt is similarly easy. From there, I simply chose the relevant menu entry to turn on system encryption.

The first snag appeared when the system encryption wizard refused to continue until I had burned an optical disk containing the recovery information (in case the volume headers were to get corrupted). I opted to copy the iso file to another location, with the ability to boot it via grub4dos if necessary in the future (or merely burn a disc as necessary). The solution to this was to re-invoke the volume creation wizard with the noisocheck option:

C:\\Program Files\\TrueCrypt>TrueCrypt Format.exe /noisocheck

One reboot followed, and I was able to let TrueCrypt go through and encrypt the system. It was then time to set up Linux.

Linux

Basic setup of my Linux system was straightforward. Arch (my distribution of choice) offers good support for LUKS encryption of the full system, so most of the installation went smoothly.

On reaching the bootloader installation phase, I let it install and configure syslinux (my loader of choice simply because it is easier to configure than GRUB), but did not install it to the MBR. With the installation complete, I had to do some work to manually back up the MBR installed by Truecrypt, then install a non-default MBR for Syslinux.

First up was backing up the Truecrypt MBR to a file:

# dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/boot/tc.bs count=1

That copies the first sector of the disk (512 bytes, containing the MBR and partition table) to a file (tc.bs) on my new /boot partition.

Before installing a Syslinux MBR, I wanted to ensure that chainloading the MBR from a file would work. To that end, I used the installer to chainload to my new installation, and used that to attempt loading Windows. The following incantation (entered manually from the syslinux prompt) eventually worked:

.com32 chain.c32 hd0 1 file=/tc.bs

Pulling that line apart, I use the chainloader to boot the file tc.bs in the base of my /boot partition, and load the first partition on my first hard drive (that is, where Windows is installed). This worked, so I booted once more into the installer to install the Syslinux MBR:

# dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda bs=1 count=440 conv=notrunc

This copies 440 bytes from the given file to my hard drive, where 440 bytes is the size of the MBR. The input file is already that size so the count parameter should not be necessary, but one cannot be too careful when doing such modification to the MBR.

Rebooting that, sadly, did not work. It turns out that the Syslinux MBR merely scans the current hard drive for partitions that are marked bootable, and boots the first one. The Truecrypt MBR does the same thing, which is troublesome– in order for Truecrypt to work the Windows partition must be marked bootable, but Syslinux is unable to find its configuration when this is the case.

Enter albmbr.bin. Syslinux ships several different MBRs, and the alternate does not scan for bootable partitions. Instead, the last byte of the MBR is set to a value indicating which partition to boot from. Following the example from the Syslinux wiki (linked above), then, I booted once more from my installer and copied the altmbr into position:

# printf '\x5' | cat /usr/lib/syslinux/altmbr.bin - | dd bs=1 count=440 conv=notrunc of=/dev/sda

This shell pipeline echoes a single byte of value 5, appends it to the contents of altmbr.bin, and writes the resulting 440 bytes to the MBR on sda. The 5 comes from the partition Syslinux was installed on, in this case the first logical partition on the disk (/dev/sda5).

With that, I was able to boot Syslinux properly and it was a simple matter to modify the configuration to boot either Windows or Linux on demand. Selected parts of my syslinux.cfg file follow:

UI menu.c32

LABEL arch
    MENU LABEL Arch Linux
    LINUX /vmlinuz-linux
    APPEND root=/dev/mapper/Homura-root cryptdevice=/dev/sda6:HomuHomu ro
    INITRD /initramfs-linux.img

LABEL windows
    MENU LABEL Windows 7
    COM32 chain.c32
    APPEND hd0 1 file=/tc.bs

Further resources

For all things Syslinux, the documentation wiki offers documentation sufficient for most purposes, although it can be somewhat difficult to navigate. A message from the Syslinux mailing list gave me the key to making Syslinux work from the MBR. The Truecrypt documentation offered some interesting information, but was surprisingly useless in the quest for a successful chainload (indeed, the volume creation wizard very clearly states that using a non-truecrypt MBR is not supported).