My ubuntu pc collapsed and i turned my internal hard drive to an external usb hard drive. After a lot of trying i ended up with a live usb on my laptop and after i enabled universe repositories and installed synaptics and gksu nautilus i finally managed to get into my encrypted hard disk drive and inside my home folder there are two icons. One text saying README and a weird purple thingy saying ACCEESS-YOUR-PRIVATE-DATA-DESKTOP. I open the readme text and it is says that i need to open the access-your-private-data-desktop. When i do that something like a terminal opens for a nanosecond and then suddenly disappears! So i try the second method that the README text says, which is running the ecryptfs-mount-private on terminal. After i do that i get a message saying ERROR: Encrypted private directory is not setup properly. Any ideas? ( i have already tried lots of things and i feel that i am so close on getting my files from the disk drive... Please! I need the files so bad.
I also tried this
sudo ecryptfs-recover-private
INFO: Searching for encrypted private directories (this might take a while)...
find: File system loop detected; /sys/kernel/debug/pinctrl' is part of the same file system loop as/sys/kernel/debug'.
2 Answers
You don't have cryptsetup installed on your second computer, install it via: sudo apt-get install cryptsetup
Once you've installed it, double click on the encrypted volume again and it should mount for you.
[Edit]
The error from your mount command mount: unknown filesystem type 'LVM2_member' tells us that it's an LVM group, and needs to be mounted slightly differently.
Hopefully the following will provide the information you need to get it mounted, based upon my system.
$ sudo pvs
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sda2 ubuntu lvm2 a-- 99.51g 0 This tells us that the volume, ubuntu is on the physical volume /dev/sda2. We then need to use the lvdisplay command to list the logical volumes in the group.
$ sudo lvdisplay /dev/ubuntu
--- Logical volume --- LV Path /dev/ubuntu/swap LV Name swap VG Name ubuntu
<snip> --- Logical volume --- LV Path /dev/ubuntu/home LV Name home VG Name ubuntu
<snip> --- Logical volume --- LV Path /dev/ubuntu/root LV Name root VG Name ubuntu
<snip>From the above we can see that I've got a home, root and swap. To mount the home partition from this group I would run the following command:
$ mount /dev/ubuntu/home /mnt/diskIf you're unsure how to modify this to suit your needs, edit your question again with the output of the pvs and lvdisplay commands. You might want to take a look at Formatting Help as well.
If you've gotten this far
i finally managed to get into my encrypted hard disk drive and inside my home folder there are two icons. One text saying README and a weird purple thingy saying ACCEESS-YOUR-PRIVATE-DATA-DESKTOP.
It means you still have your home folder encrypted, with eCryptFS. Now you need to run the ecryptfs-recover-private script and it should search for any encrypted homes (or you can point it at your encrypted home files) and ask you for your old user passphrase, or the backup copy of the master passphrase you should have made when you set up your home encryption, and then it should mount your encrypted home (probably in /tmp/ecryptfs.XXXXXXXX) so you can read / back them up. May be mounted as another user, so probably will need to read as root.
If it errors out while searching, that's ok since you are already looking at your "dummy" home files "README" & "ACCEESS-YOUR-PRIVATE-DATA.desktop", which are usually in /[mountpoint]/home/[username] so just look in the /[mountpoint]/home/ folder for your encrypted files, which should be in /[mountpoint]/home/.ecryptfs/[username]/.Private and pass that to the ecryptfs-recover-private script.
See man ecryptfs-recover-private for more info.
ProTip: ALWAYS make BACKUPS of important data, and encryption keys/headers, so you'll never have this problem again
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