Bug #409
Updated by Daniel Curtis almost 10 years ago
I've encountered a problem where I have lost my USB booloader used to boot into my primary OS; which consists of two LUKS encrypted partitions, one for / and one for /home. Not only were the partitions encrypted, but also the user folders via ecryptfs. Luckily, I was not ultra-paranoid and only used a passphrase with LUKS and not a passphrase/keyfile combination. To begin I booted into a live ubuntu environment and dropped into a root shell: <pre> sudo su </pre> h2. Open and mount the LUKS containers * First open up the LUKS encrypted partitions: <pre> cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda5 root cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda6 home </pre> NOTE: This will prompt for a passphrase. Recovering the passphrase is beyond the scope of this guide. * Next, mount the mapped partitions: <pre> mount /dev/mapper/root /mnt mount /dev/mapper/home /mnt/home </pre> * Mount the device, process, and system mountpoints: <pre> mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc </pre> h2. Mount the Read-Only eCryptfs Now that I had access to both my root and home partitions, I needed to recover my personal files. These were encrypted using ecryptfs, and it just so happens there is a tool just for recovering ecryptfs partition. * From the root terminal, run the recovery command: <pre> ecryptfs-recover-private </pre> This will prompt a few questions including the login passphase of the user's directory that recovery is ran on. Once the recovery is complete, a read-only version will be available. h2. Transfer the files to another machine Now that I had access to my files, I used rsync to backup my files to another machine: <pre> cd /tmp/ecrypt.63f8g4 rsync -avh --progress -n . -e ssh user@backup.example.com:/path/to/backup/folder </pre> NOTE: Make sure to remove the -n flag to remove the 'dry-run' option. h2. Resources * http://citizen428.net/blog/2011/10/17/fixing-grub-on-a-luks-encrypted-disk * https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/ecryptfs.html * https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedPrivateDirectory