Ubuntu
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Recover passphrase in Natty

Asked by Iqbal

Summary:
A laptop with core 2 duo 64 bits, nvidia drivers, dual boot with vista and ubuntu 9.10. Three partitions for Vista and four for Ubuntu (/, /boot, /home and swap) total 500 GB HDD and 4GB RAM

Ubuntu 9.10 was running smoothly. After the release of Natty, I installed it with nomodeset boot option (pressing F6). During installation, I selected the option of encrypting the /home directory. I used it for a day only. Next day, at the time of logging-in, the system hanged, thereafter nothing happened. I tried to reinstall Natty, it took more than usual time. Finally the installer crashed with a message of disk errors.

Because Karmic was running successfully, I installed Karmic again with encrypted /home (Encrypted with 11.04) as /home. It also gave disk errors. Windows also informs that the disk may fail soon.

Now if I boot from Natty’s Live CD the disk utility keeps on telling disk health problems. If I try to mount /home folder on /mnt and try to CD /mnt - Input/Output error comes up. Suddenly, if I fdisk –l, not partition is listed, though there are eight (8) partitions. GParted also showed that no devices found. If I reboot them this issue disappears and fdisk –l lists all partitions.

I rebooted with Natty’s Live CD and could reach to the point to issue the command ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase /home/username/.ecryptfs/wrapped-passphrase.
 This command gave following massage:

ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase: error while loading shared libraries: libecryptfs.so.0: can not open shared object file: No such file or directory

My problem is
1- How to recover passphrase
2- Recover data
3- How to know that wrapped-passphrase file is there?

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Cameron W (cwill747) said : 		#1

Hey, check out http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1601413. Or, check out the FAQ on recovering passwords.
FAQ #356: “How do I reset my password in Ubuntu ?”.

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Iqbal (naqvi-iqbal2001) said : 		#2

Hi,
Yesterday, I booted with Natty LiveCD and opened the terminal. The fdisk -l listed all the eight (8) partitons. I mounted the home partition (mount -t ext4 /dev/sda7 /mnt). Thereafter, I executed the command ecryptfs-recover-private, it gave some error. Then I again executed fdisk -l ---- no partiton was listed as if there were no partitions on the disk. Consequently, I can not move on.

Whatever, I do with /home partition, OS shows a massege that the disk has health problems.

Now any ideas please....

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#3

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.