Ubuntu Installation :: Recovering Files From Old Encrypted Home?
Apr 25, 2010
I purchased a larger hard drive to upgrade my HTPC running MythTV and a Samba file server. I put the old hard drive into an e-SATA enclosure and can still boot to it to access my files, but I can't seem to mount it correctly under the new installation to copy over my files even though I have the mount passphrase and encrypted filenames key.I have tried using this howto, but I run into problems with the encrypted filenames.This is how I'm doing it. I replaced the actual key data with A's and B's to protect my keys:
Let's begin from the top. I have a relatively new laptop that I've been running Ubuntu on (along with a little-used Windows boot). Picked it up in November or so, installed the current "latest" version of Ubuntu at the time (9.10). I have been doing incremental upgrades, and it's been progressively breaking down more and more. Yes, this includes 10.04.
After GRUB stopped working, I decided it was time to try a reinstall from the top. I told it to leave all the other operating systems alone and do a full reinstall.
Fortunately, I had managed to stuff most of my current work in duplicate locations during this whole debacle, somehow. Don't ask me how I managed to do that when GRUB wasn't working. However, when I installed, I conscientiously said "Oh, yes, Ubuntu, encrypt my home folder! I love privacy!" As a result, about... 30 gigabytes of useful (but ultimately re-downloadable) material is rather inaccessible at the moment. When I try to boot the old system using the newly fixed GRUB, it goes into kernel panic. This seems like a no-go.
I have a saved hojillion-character long passphrase for decryption from my install back in November. Conscientiously saved in the case of just such an emergency.
I read this how-to and followed it to the letter as far as I could tell, trying to mount with ecrytfs to recover my data.
[USERNAME] here is a proxy for my actual username. Yes, the location of my old home folder may seem a little bizarre.
Code: sudo mount -t ecryptfs /media/c82ca9fe-2b15-4aca-a98d-6482b1d80a32/home/[USERNAME]/ /home/[USERNAME]/oldhome Passphrase: Select cipher: 1) aes: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 32 (not loaded)
I'm running Debian Squeeze AMD64 with full disk encryption and LVM. After reinstalling Windows 7 I lost GRUB from the MBR. I managed to install GRUB after following this guide and using an Ubuntu 10.04 graphical installation disc, but I only get to a GRUB CLI when booting, so I can't actually choose an OS there.
I tried following this guide but I'm stuck after "# Mount the partitions to /mnt/root" and don't know what to do.
Does anyone know how I can fix GRUB so I get to choose between Debian and Windows 7 there?
i am a new guy here..i unfortunately removed all my files from /home folderrm -rf ~ /. picasa / As some of the files were important i tried recovering data using foremost..i used the command foremost -i /dev/sda1 -o /mnt/foremostThen there started a process..it was downloading something..and i left the computer for an hour or so..when i return there was nothing on screen..so i reloaded the system..And after that when i try to login i get the error"xsession: warning: unable to write to /tmp; xsession may exit with an error"..so when i googled for it i found its because there is no memmory in my /root ..so i tried login via console (tried ctrl+alt+f1..after the login screen appears..when i type ctrl+alt+f1 i get a black screen)..but nothings happening...how can i login via console..can my datas be recovered.
I upgraded from ubuntu 9.10 to 11.04. During installation (Natty) I chosen the option to encrypt the home folder. After a day the system crashed. It was showing that disk is having health problems. If I boot from live cd then i cant access the home folder. When I tried to mount the home folder, it says "Reading directory: input/output error"
Because I used Karmic without problem I reinstalled the Karmic, then I can mount the home folder, but cant access it as it was encrypted.Now Karmic is installed. I tried to boot from Live CD of Natty and tried to mount /home folder, it says some super-block issues.How to access the files in the home folder?
I have been using fedora 12 for last 6 months, recently I bought an external USB hard drive of 320 GB capacity. I made 2 partitions using the Disk Utility in Fedora. I encrypted the first partition as it was supposed to hold a lot of sensitive data, and yes it did have. Now I had to change my OS to AV linux for some audio-video editing work which wasnt being done properly on fedora due to some issue beyond my knowledge. now the problem is my encrypted partition is not accessible in my new installation. I see an empty space on my /dev/sda1. although no change to partition data has been done and the data on the second partition /dev/sda2 is easily accessible. when putting the drive on automount, is does not ask me for the password and neither does it show me the data. I have tried fdisk and sme other utilities but have failed to get my drive unencrypted.
I recently suffered a hard disk failure, meaning I had to replace the faulty device. After attempting to mount the old faulty hard drive using and external caddy, I got the following message... Unable to mount 144 GB Filesystem Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb5, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so
I'd like to attempt to recover what I can from my /home directory but unfortunately I use encryption (although I do actually know my pass phrase). What procedures and software can I use to try and recover data from this drive?
I have recently recovered from an HDD failure on my Drobo. One of the disks died and corrupted the entire array (which is not supposed to happen). I have since managed to copy the data off onto smaller disks and after replacing the failed drive, have copied everything back.
Now that im up and running again, i was wondering how this situation would play out on encrypted disks, or in the case of a drobo a large encrypted partition (as you cannot encrypt the entire array).
Would i still be able to recover the data if i were to encrypt it? It is a 4.2TB array, and i assume that I would need to copy the data in its entirety to recover it, so using multiple smaller disks would be out of the question right?
I was trying to fix some hardware on my laptop and i ended up mucking the whole thing up. The HDD seems to fine though. I have it in a external HDD enclosure and it's plugged into my mothers desktop through usb.I'm trying to print some files I have, but my home directory on the external HDD is encrypted.
I tried upgrading to 10.04, and now when it boots it just goes into a grub2 terminal and doesn't display a boot menu. I tried re-installing grub2 from the live cd, but that didn't do anything. I figured if I've hosed the last install I'll install from scratch, but I can't even access my files from the live cd! I did a bit of searching and everyone seems to just encrypt ~/Private, whereas I've encrypted the whole home directory. So much for security... In the live cd, it has a readme.txt and says to type "ecryptfs-mount-private" to access the files, but it just gives the error "ERROR: Encrypted private directory is not setup properly". What do I do?
I'm wiping out / on an Ubuntu box but want to keep everything in /home/, which is mounted on a different partition. Using Code: ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase ~/.ecryptfs/wrapped-passphrase I have unwrapped the passphrase, resulting in a ~25 character alphanumeric string. Is it possible for me to install from a disk and give the installer the (current) passphrase so that it will automatically mount my home directory?
I have installed fedora 11 in my system. While installing it asked me encrypted password which i passed. But I forgot that. Now the problem is whenever i boot my system before going to root itself it is asking for volume encrypted password, which as i told you i have forgot. Now i am not able to access my hard disk since it is completely locked. Is there any way to decrypt the password or unlock it. Or if that is not possible can data be recovered,which is my primary requirement..
I have installed fedora 11 in my system. While installing it asked me encrypted password which i passed. But I forgot that. Now the problem is whenever i boot my system before going to root itself it is asking for volume encrypted password, which as i told you i have forgot. Now i am not able to access my hard disk since it is completely locked. Is there any way to decrypt the password or unlock it. Or if that is not possible can data be recovered,which is my primary requirement..
I encrypted "/" and "/home" during boot with F12. Now I'm trying to install F13. The problem is it will not allow to specify /home as the mount point. It will take /home and not complain but when I get back to summary there is no mount point, just blank. When I entered the passphrase it didn't complain so I think that is okay. The / dir I said I wanted to format, so it accepted the / mount point.
I tried to go ahead and install F13 anyway thinking it may figure this out. However it didn't use my /home but created a new /home.
I have installed Kubuntu 10.04 x64 from scratch using the alternate installation CD and unfortunately I'm experiencing some serious troubles. Everything worked fine, installed packages, moved my backed-up data to my encrypted /home partition - until I rebooted. Usually I reboot the system right after the installation process to see if the boot process shows any errors, but what can I say, seems like I forgot to do it this time .
The problem is that the boot process just "hangs" right before the login window should disappear. By "hang" I mean dead: no switching to virtual terminals, no CTRL-ALT-DEL - the system just freezes. I'm quite familiar with doing things shell-wise, so I started the "Rescue Mode" from the alternate CD and was able to mount my root partition.
Problem #1: No faulty log entries whatsoever: dmesg, boot.log, messages etc. all looking fine - except Xorg.0.log. I suspect the proprietary Nvidia drivers to be the culprit here, because what I'm getting is: "Caught signal 11 (Segmentation Fault). Server aborting"
Running "startx" as root from the rescue shell gives the same results: complete system freeze. "Looks like a reinstallation candidate, let's just backup my data" I thought, which brings us to
Problem #2: I can't mount my encrypted /home from the rescue shell. The exact steps involved are:
Mount my root partition and chroot to it. Issuing "ecryptfs-mount-private" gives the following error message: "ERROR: Encrypted private directory is not setup properly" Becoming my user "su - faulty" and trying step 2 again yields the same results. I feel like I'm almost there: I'm executing commands in my root environment, just can't seem to access my data which I'd like to backup before doing a clean reinstall. Any thoughts?
I want to create a user with a encrypted home folder. I tried "sudo adduser --encrypt-home username" but I get following error "adduser: Could not find program named `ecryptfs-setup-private' in $PATH". I installed the cryptsetup package but without result.
I had errors pop up when I tried updating my 10.10 to 11.04 so I ended up having to do it from a Live USB which installs it over everything (fine by me).Unfortunately I forgot I had an encrypted /home directory. So various messages and stuff came up when I tried to log in.nfortunately I don't remember what my encryption passphrase is offhand, so I moved it to a slightly different folder name and had to have a new directory created for my username.It's still there, but how can I try to open it trying the various versions of the passphrase I think it may be? Can I double-click it and try?Also, in the future what is the best way to handle a "fresh" install that I want to connect to my encrypted /home directory?
I just tried reinstalling ubuntu 11.04 from the live disc, installation went well but afterwards I cannot get access to my home directory which is encrypted and I stupidly forgot to note the mount passphrase. is there anything I can do? where would the mount passphrase be stored from the previous installation and is there any chance of recoving it. Home and the root are on the same drive and the installation did not format the drive.
I have a laptop that I have been running 64bit lucid on after some problems with NFS Samba and SMB the installation got a bit trashed after some workarounds I removed nautilus completely and rebooted and got the looping login screen........ then I tried a suggestion to purge gdm but that left me with a blank grey screen and a mouse pointer. X11 has failed so I have no graphics
I can login properly to the drive from the terminal and can access my drive contents... I cannot load dolphin or nautilus from the terminal. So I have booted from a live cd and have moved some of my data to another partition but some is locked to the owner (me). How can I get my locked data opened so I can copy or move it to another drive, so I can perform a fresh install.
I was installing Ubuntu to the internal disk in my main machine, with all external drives unplugged for safety - then discovered I had accidentally chosen the external drive and it wasn't unplugged. (Seeing three drives not two listed as installation targets should have tipped me off, but I guess my IQ was low that day.)The external drive, in compliance with Murphy's Law, was my backup drive with all vital current files.The last few months of work gone.Now the drive shows only the stuff I normally expect in / on any Linux machine. It mounts showing as ext4, but the disk was (I'm 98.5% sure) originally ext3.However, the installation did not finish.Whatever files got copied, clobbered only a fraction of the disk. df reports only 1% of the space used.Maybe the bulk of my valuable files are okay, and could be recovered with some tool?
There are other questions on this site about file recovery, but many are for Microsoft Windows, or for malfunctioning disks, or some other situation. I'm on Linux with a physically healthy external disk. I'm fairly sure that the more recent and more important files are in multiple copies on that disk, so if one copy is clobbered there's hope to get the second copy.
Lately when i open my computer i encountered failed in loading system. its goes like this. Unexpected error, run fsck manually...log in as root. I have to log in as root and type fsck try to fix bad blocks. the mandriva ask me to reboot so i reboot my computer. after loading system, in log in screen. I click my username then type my password and press enter. There is a message prompt on me. "Your home directory is listed as:'/home/Gonzalo' but it does not appear to exist. Do you want to log in with the / (root) directory? it is unlikely anything will work unless you use a failsafe session.
I needed to install a new OS on a new HD but i also need the data on the old HD which has some problems (it doesn't boot anymore). The problem is that in the old one i had linux (Slackware) and so it doesn't allow me to view the content of the folder /home/myself. If there was something possible to do to recover all the data or if it will be forever lost.
Dummy me let root run out of space because I didn't know to use logrotate. I was able to compress the system logs but not before the damage was done me thinks; now the computer is unbootable. I booted from a LiveCD and got my old partitions mounted under /media/oldroot to try and recover files; however, I forgot that I had encrypted my home. I found [URL] and was following it; however, I seem to run into a bunch of path issues after I chroot.
The chroot command returns: bash: groups: command not found
The su command returns: -su: cut: command not found -su: getent: command not found -su: expr: command not found -su: groups: command not found
Finally, the ecryptfs-mount-private command returns: -su: ecryptfs-mount-private: command not found
I have separate partitons for /, /home, /tmp, /usr, and /usr/local and bothered to mount the first 2. (If only I had been ambitious enough to create a /var). I was running Ubuntu 10.10.
I have choosen to encrypt Ubuntu 10.10 during installation (no alternate installation). After some time of working properly I get following error message after I put in correct password :
"Could not update ICE authority file /home/surf1/.ICE authority"
When I click "ok" following error message is shown :
"there is a problem with the configurationserver (/usr/lib/libconf2-4/gconf-sanity-check-2 finished with status 256)"
When I click this "ok" next error message appears :
"Nautilus could not create following necessary files : home/surf1/Desktop,/home/surf1/.nautilus"
After I click here ok nothing else happen anymore and I get not access to my account and so to my data.
I'm recently switched my work laptop from running winXP to runing karmic. I'm still at the stage of getting my various bits and bobs working correctly. One of these I (may) have a problem with is backup's. I've ran backuppc on a ubuntu 9.04 box in the attic for the last year or so and I've been backing up my laptop to that. But since the switch, since I have an encrypted home dir, what is being backed up is the encrypted files. First, can I recover these if needed (I kept a copy of my passphrase), or can I get backuppc to ssh in as me with my home dir mounted correctly?
Backuppc is using rsync over ssh I've been using linux on and off since about redhat 5.0, so I'm not afraid of the command line or vi
I recently did a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10 and when I did I chose to have /home on it's own partition and have it encrypted. The more I think about it the more I regret this decision. What if I want to switch distros down the road? What if I have to boot from a live cd to back up files? Is there a way to "undo" the encrypted home folder permanently? I don't mind having it on it's own partition, it's just the encryption that makes me worry.
I recently installed Ubuntu Karmic on my netbook (I tried netbook remix but preferred the look of the regular desktop edition). When during installation, the option to encrypt the home folder appeared, and being mildly paranoid I thought, "sure, why not?" (I must warn you that I am a new user with little technical knowledge other than what I have managed to gather in a semi-passive manner over the past couple of months). The problem is, I (try to) backup my data weekly, and so today I gave it a shot (I got the desktop edition a week ago). I have encountered the following problem.
I backup my system following (approximately) the instructions at [URL] for Backup The exact command I enter at backup is:
(I exclude my music folder as it is huge and I already have it all in several other locations) When I executed this command all ran smoothly for a while, however it soon began backing up the directory /home/.ecryptfs/dan/.Private At this point, it started backing up the huge number of files in this directory. I assume these are encryption keys? Forgive my ignorance... Anyway, it took several hours going through this folder, and finally bzip gave up, complaining of excessive file size:
bzip2: I/O or other error, bailing out. Possible reason follows. bzip2: File too large Input file = (stdin), output file = (stdout)
I assume that excluding the encryption keys and such from the backup would be a bad idea: I guess that if I did not restore the relevant directories along with my home folder, it would be inaccessible? Is there a way to avoid backing up such a large amount of data?
During the installation of Ubuntu Karmic, I picked the option that encrypts my home directory.
A few questions:
(1) Shortly after installation, I was asked to run a command to print a key necessary for data recovery from a rescue CD. I didn't run it at the time and am now looking for the command to run. What is it?
(2) I think I read somewhere that this also encrypts swap. Great. Correct me if that's wrong.
(3) If I suspend the machine, is my home directory encrypted? That is, if I have this on a laptop and travel with the suspended laptop and someone steals it, are my data safe, or not?
(4) I assume the weakest point in the system is my relatively short login password (but I think the install tests it and found it okay). Is there a recommendation how long this should be?
