I'm trying to recover my files from a now broken Antergos install, and have run into trouble because the user/non-boot partition is encrypted with LUKS encryption.
I'm booting from an Ubuntu 18.04 bootable USB drive so I can backup the directories where I had data I wanted, and didn't realize it was encrypted until I went to go view the partition in the file explorer, and it didn't show up. It was suggested to me that it may not be mounted, and after looking at GParted it's clear that that was the problem, and it seems like it wasn't mounted because it's encrypted (prior experiences with backing up before reinstalling or switching distros never involved any problems with the partition I was recovering files from not being mounted).
As some additional information:
- I have the password that was required in order to boot and get to the greeter. I'm operating under the assumption that that's my encryption key, but I may be mistaken, I'm rather out of my depth here.
- The partition/volume in question is sda3 (not sure which is the correct term) and in addition to being encrypted it uses LVM. I'm not sure how that impacts things, but the impression I've gotten from the reading I've been doing to try and resolve this seems to suggest that it matters
- I initially tried to mount the partition via the command line trying two different methods, and both returned different errors. Unfortunately I let my computer die because I walked away from my computer for a while before trying again, and I can't find any of the pages I was referencing and attempting to follow along with, or commands I tried, or errors I got back. The error I can provide is that when I tried to follow this guide the command: "
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda3/ recoverytarget
" returned: "Device /dev/sda3/ doesn't exist or access denied.
" I assume that I need to mount the partition before I can de-encrypt it, but again I may be mistaken
it's been a while since I worked on any of my Linux machines, and I'm not the most technically competent or linux experienced person in the world, so please forgive any instances where it's painfully clear I don't understand something
EDIT/UPDATE: The error I was getting was because I wasn't running the command with sudo in front, so now I officially feel stupid, but I'm now running into a different problem where "sudo mkdir /mnt/recoverytarget && mount /dev/mapper/recoverytarget /mnt/recoverytarget
" returns: "mount: only root can do that
"
/dev/sda3
, without the/
at the end.sudo
, rather than the usage of/
&&
marks a separate command. Addsudo
after&&
mount
, because only root can do that.sudo
. The commandsudo -s
will get you one of those.