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I was attempting to add a Mint partition to my Ubuntu 12.04/Win7 box, when the whole process went south on me. Mint installed correctly but removed the Ubuntu/Win options from my Grub menu. Attempting to fix that was where things got messed up -- currently the box boots to a grub> prompt.

Using grub I can find a kernal image and boot to a busybox prompt, but if I attempt to continue the boot process, it enters a kernal panic (exit code is 00000200).

What seems really weird is that my old Ubuntu home folder is accessible if I boot with a Mint or Ubuntu LiveCD (mounted under /media), however my /home/liav subdirectory has been ecrypted. I don't recall ever setting up any /home/liav encryption. I can sudo into /media/home/liav and cat the README file therein which only says "THIS DIRECTORY HAS BEEN UNMOUNTED TO PROTECT YOUR DATA" plus instructions to 'ecryptfs-mount-private', which I obviously can't do as root in a liveCD session (returns 'Encrypted private directory is not setup properly'). Using 'chown -R' to take ownership of the directories made no difference.

  • Why was /home/liav ecrypted?
  • Is there a way I can recreate the user account which would have access to the encrypt keys?

I did do a back up of my main /home subdirectory, but would prefer not to lose the dir if possible.

LiavK
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1 Answers1

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Assuming you can't recover your Ubuntu installation, you can use ecryptfs-recover-private to mount your home directory.

First start by making sure that the partition that contains the home directory you want to open is mounted and opened. Then, in a Terminal, run sudo ecryptfs-recover-private /path/to/home/directory. By default, it will be mounted in read-only mode, but you can have it in read-write mode by passing in the flag --rw. Follow the prompts, and your home directory will be mounted in a temporary location.

saiarcot895
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