Trying to recover Ubuntu encrypted home

seanh snhmnd at gmail.com
Fri Oct 8 23:31:58 UTC 2010


Hey,

I had Ubuntu 10.04 installed on my old hard drive with an encrypted
home directory. I got a new hard drive, put it in my computer and did
a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 onto it, again with an encrypted home
directory, same user name, same login password.

The old hard drive is still in my computer as well, and now I'd like
to copy the files from the encrypted home dir on the old drive over
onto the encrypted home dir on the new drive.

I've been trying to follow the instructions here:

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2009/03/mounting-your-encrypted-home-from.html

But they don't work. At the point when I should see my decrypted home
dir, I just see it still encrypted. Here's how it looks in my shell:

seanh at kisimul:~$ sudo mount /dev/sdb5 /mnt
[sudo] password for seanh:
seanh at kisimul:~$ ls /mnt
bin    dev         initrd.img.old  mnt   sbin     tmp      vmlinuz.old
boot   etc         lib             opt   selinux  usr
cdrom  home        lost+found      proc  srv      var
data   initrd.img  media           root  sys      vmlinuz
seanh at kisimul:~$ ls /mnt/home
seanh  shannon  test
seanh at kisimul:~$ ls /mnt/home/seanh
Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop  README.txt
seanh at kisimul:~$ sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
seanh at kisimul:~$ sudo mount -o bind /dev/shm /mnt/dev/shm
seanh at kisimul:~$ sudo mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
seanh at kisimul:~$ sudo mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys
seanh at kisimul:~$ sudo chroot /mnt
root at kisimul:/# su - seanh
keyctl_search: Required key not available
Perhaps try the interactive 'ecryptfs-mount-private'
kisimul% ls
Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop  README.txt
kisimul% ecryptfs-mount-private
Enter your login passphrase:
Inserted auth tok with sig [************] into the user session keyring

INFO: Your private directory has been mounted.
INFO: To see this change in your current shell:
  cd /home/seanh

kisimul% cd /home/seanh
kisimul% ls
Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop  README.txt
kisimul%




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