Recover data from encrypted home partition
I’ve had an old desktop computer running Ubuntu sitting in my corner for quite some time. Now that I have a HDD dock, it was time to see what could be salvaged!
Since I have not written down the mount passphrase (big mistake!), it took some searching…
Find /home and / partitions
Connect your old HDD and run:
$ sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1: 7,9 GiB, 8432123904 bytes, 16468992 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk /dev/sdb: 596,2 GiB, 640135028736 bytes, 1250263728 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x000e94b7
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 2048 585936895 585934848 279,4G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 585938942 1250263039 664324098 316,8G 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 1234638848 1250263039 15624192 7,5G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 585938944 1234638847 648699904 309,3G 83 Linux
My partitions are /dev/sdb1 (home) and /dev/sdb6 (root).
Mount partitions
So let’s mount them in the right place for recovery:
sudo umount /dev/sdb1
sudo umount /dev/sdb6
sudo mount /dev/sdb6 /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/home
sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount -o bind /dev/shm /mnt/dev/shm
sudo mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys
and chroot it:
$ sudo chroot /mnt
root@sebastopol# su - basti
basti@sebastopol$ ecrypt-mount-private
Enter your login passphrase: ***
Recover data
Now I can simply copy my data to anywhere on my old HDD, for instance in /mnt/data.
Voilá!