Recover encrypted home folder after reinstallation
Yesterday I did a fresh installation of Ubuntu 14.10 over Ubuntu 14.04 and now I am not able to decrypt my home folder. I had two separate partitions: /
and /home
.
I formatted my /
partition but kept my /home
partition. Now I am not able to log in to my account. I get following error:
signature not found in user keyring perhaps try the interactive 'ecryptfs-mount-private'
.
When I try ecryptfs-mount-private
command, it tells me that my login passphrase is wrong. I am using my password as my login passphrase. I haven't changed my password for a long long time, and my current password is same as my old password. So I am not sure why it is not working. When I try ecryptfs-verify -p
command, it tells me that the configuration is invalid with error:
ERROR: Mount point [/home/$USER] is user's home
ERROR: Configuration invalid
While ecryptfs-verify -h
doesn't give any error. What am I doing wrong?
I did save my mount passphrase as well but when I try to use it from live usb using ecryptfs-recover-private
, I get success
but the mounted directory is still encrypted.
I was finally able to decrypt my home folder and recover my data. These are the steps I followed:
- Renamed my old home folder from
/home/$USER
to/home/$USER_old
- Created a new home folder using
mkhomedir_helper
command - Logged in GUI mode (before I was not able to log in because my home folder was not getting decrypted)
- Checked if I can unwrap my old
wrapped-passphrase
file using the same password I was trying before:
ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase /home/$USER_old/.ecryptfs/wrapped-passphrase
and voila, now I am able to unwrap it which I was not able to do before, neither when I was logged in text mode nor when I was trying to do it from live USB! And it turns out that the mount passphrase I had saved was not the same as the one wrapped in wrapped-passphrase
file! And now that I look into it, the wrapped-passphrase
file was changed just last month although I have been using the same login password for years! Anyway...
- Now that I have correct mount passphrase, to decrypt and mount my home folder, I just followed the steps listed in this answer: https://askubuntu.com/a/36783/271868
Test this:
Switch on your computer.
Press and hold the Shift key.
In the Grub menu select the line which starts with ---- Advanced options.
Select the line ending with --- recovery mode.
Your PC should display a menu with a number of options, select --- Drop to root shell prompt.
In a terminal run:
mount -o remount,rw /
mount --all
mount -t ecryptfs /home/user_name/.Private /home/user_name/Private
Your data encrypted in /home/user-name/.Private should be decrypted and mounting to /home/user_name/Private