I purchased a hard drive caddy for my Thinkpad T61p to convert the optical drive bay into a second hard drive bay. It pains me to say it, but I wanted to put Windows Vista back on the laptop. There are too many reasons to list why, but that meant having to give up more hard drive space than I was willing to share between Vista and Ubuntu.
My desired layout was to have Vista inhabit a 320GB drive occupying the main bay while Ubuntu would live on its own 320GB drive in the caddy. Dual-booting would be done through the Bios in order to avoid, among other things, having grub issues.
The biggest concern was the encrypted partition that contains separate root and home logical volumes. I wanted to make an exact image copy with dd but retain its encrypted state. However, I was unsure how I could access the data from the image without restoring it. I knew you could mount ISOs through a loop device, but an encrypted image was a lot different. Here’s how I did it.
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