After my motherboard has been changed, the system does not start any more. I think I will have to re-install, but in this case, I am affraid that the encrypted dir will not mount at login any more (will it?)
So, I am trying to first recover my home, using a live distribution. I have tried to follow advices from StackExchange and elsewhere (e.g. here) but:
sudo ecryptfs-recover-private
only says:
INFO: Searching for encrypted private directories (this might take a while)...
find: ‘/run/user/999/gvfs’: Permission denied
find: File system loop detected; ‘/sys/kernel/debug/pinctrl’ is part of the same file system loop as ‘/sys/kernel/debug’.
So I tried to give the directory path:
sudo ecryptfs-recover-private '/media/ubuntu-gnome/<UUID>/username'
After entering the passphrase, I obtained a 'success' message, saying the decrypted directory was mounted in '/tmp/ecryptfs.SOMETHING' but this directory contained:
Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop
README.txt
.ecryptfs
.Private
I guess this means it is not recovered. Then, trying again the same command resulted in failure with:
mount: mount(2) failed: No such file or directory
ERROR: Failed to mount private data at [/tmp/ecryptfs.SOMETHINGELSE].
OK, maybe I made a mistake in the passphrase, but I tried several times...
Additional information: my home is at the root of a disk having one partition, the system is on another disk. Exploring the data disk with nautilus shows:
<UUID>
+-- username
+-- Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop
+-- README.txt
+-- .ecryptfs
+-- .Private
+-- .ecryptfs
+-- username
+-- .ecryptfs
+-- auto-mount
+-- auto-umount
+-- Private.mnt
+-- Private.sig
+-- wrapped-passphrase
+-- .wrapped-passphrase.recorded
+-- .Private
In particular, I am surprised to find:
/media/ubuntu-gnome/<UUID>/.ecryptfs/username/.ecryptfs
Is this a normal structure?
EDIT The answer was just a couple of pages away:
see the answer by @rausch the life saver to Trying to mount old encrypted home
And, by the way, my directory structure was normal.
