Ubuntu on Lenovo x61s - Help needed

[Peter]

I removed the system disk and connected to another ubuntu box via a usb 
port.
The disk was visible and when selected asked fot the encryption 
password. This was accepted and the response was the disk does not have 
a recognisable file system.
Does this mean the disk has failed completely?
Is there any possibility of getting access to the home directory files?

Regards

Peter Goggin

On 06/09/15 23:37, Brandon Vincent wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 6, 2015 at 12:27 AM, Peter <petergoggin at bigpond.com> wrote:
>> How do I procede? Does this mean the dis has failed?
> When Ubuntu boots straight to BusyBox (the initramfs) under normal
> conditions, this means that it was unable to locate a suitable root
> partition to switch_root to.
>
> Personally, I'd do the following,
>
> Backup the data which you believe is important. I believe Karl gave
> some instructions to do this with dd(1). Once completed, you are going
> to want to check if the hard drive was the cause of the problem. If
> the drive is starting to exhibit uncorrectable bad sectors, it will
> fail a SMART short test.
>
> smartctl --test=short /dev/sda
> smartctl -a /dev/sda
>
> Make sure that the second command returns "Completed without error"
> for the last "Short offline" test.
>
> If the drive isn't going bad, it's more likely that you've somehow
> damaged the filesystem which rests on top of the LUKS volume.
>
> Mount the encrypted volume:
>
> sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda5 root
>
> Then check the filesystem:
>
> sudo fsck /dev/mapper/root
>
> Brandon Vincent
>