Recovering a File from an Encrypted Disk

Using PhotoRec to recover lost data
Forum rules
When asking for technical support:
- Search for posts on the same topic before posting a new question.
- Give clear, specific information in the title of your post.
- Include as many details as you can, MOST POSTS WILL GET ONLY ONE OR TWO ANSWERS.
- Post a follow up with a "Thank you" or "This worked!"
- When you learn something, use that knowledge to HELP ANOTHER USER LATER.
Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
Locked
Message
Author
craigh
Posts: 2
Joined: 05 Jun 2014, 17:48
Location: Vancouver, Canada

Recovering a File from an Encrypted Disk

#1 Post by craigh »

Hi there,

First of all, thank-you for this software. I can't say that it has saved my life yet, but I'm working on it. :)

I have a similar question to the one at http://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/phot ... t3378.html . However, I didn't want to hijack that thread, and my situation is probably not identical anyway.

SUMMARY: I think I need to manually mount the target drive before I run Photorec, but I'm not having any luck doing that. Can someone tell me the right command to mount an encrypted drive read-only?

LONGER VERSION:

I have a laptop running Ubuntu 13.10. It has two drives: /dev/sda (the boot drive) is a 120 GB SSD, and /dev/sdb (secondary drive, where I store most of my data) is a 500 GB HDD. As with the author of the above thread, the secondary drive is encrypted. I'm new to running my own Linux machine, so right now this machine is pretty much running various defaults. During the set-up process I was asked if I wanted to encrypt the secondary drive and I selected yes, and created a pass phrase. I believe this was encrypted using LUKS. Each time I log in I must enter the pass phrase to access the secondary hard drive. This is the way I want it, so everything is good from that perspective.

Being a Windows refugee I'm still evaluating and/or getting used to software that is new to me. On Windows I was using a plain-text editor (Textpad) that automatically stripped the trailing spaces in a file each time it saved. I liked this feature and found a plug-in for Gedit that did the same thing. I made the mistake of running this plug-in on a 1.1 MB file in which I am constantly adding and removing notes, and have been for years. To make a long story short, the load on the machine spiked and this plug-in was obviously not up to the job on a file this big, and I ended up killing it and Gedit.

Result: My 1.1 MB file was now only about 12 kB; 99% of my data in that file was gone, all the newest data from about 300 lines in to the end, of course.

The file was not deleted, per se, but apparently seems to have been overwritten, so I'm hoping there's still something on the drive for me to recover. (Hence my selection of the "file recovery" sub-forum instead of the "file undelete" sub-forum.) I only really need a few hundred lines from the end of the file, so even a fragment would be fine.

I very quickly unmounted the drive (/dev/sdb) to prevent further writes to it, and have been reading about file recovery ever since. Photorec looked like the best place to start. I was going to try and mount the drive read-only, but it seemed to me (from what I was seeing and reading) that maybe Photorec might do this or access the drive somehow. I found it odd that I was never asked for the pass phrase for the drive, but Photorec seemed to be doing something, so I left it for the four hours it took to tell me that there were no recoverable files.

So I decided to mount the drive and try again, but I'm getting errors. Looking at the properties for the drive shown in the file browser (which I believe is Nautilus) told me that the drive is "ext3/ext4". I found it odd that both are shown, but that's what it shows. So I tried mounting it like this:

Code: Select all

sudo mount -t ext4 -o ro,noload /dev/sdb /romount
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so
The directory /romount does exist. I also tried /dev/sdb1:

Code: Select all

sudo mount -t ext4 -o ro,noload /dev/sdb1 /romount
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so
I tried ext3 too with the same result.

Here is what looks to me like the relevant part of "dmesg":

Code: Select all

[133424.725224] EXT3-fs (sdb): error: can't find ext3 filesystem on dev sdb.
[133424.725319] EXT4-fs (sdb): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem
[133424.725388] FAT-fs (sdb): Unrecognized mount option "noload" or missing value
[133598.738011] EXT4-fs (sdb): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem
[133736.662950] EXT4-fs (sdb): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem
[133903.874913] EXT4-fs (sdb1): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem
Based on a post I read elsewhere, I ran fdisk and parted to get information that might be useful to someone helping me. Here are the outputs:

Code: Select all

leftseat@selous:~/recovered20140605/photorec$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders, total 234441648 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000a59df

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048   226050047   113024000   83  Linux
/dev/sda2       226050048   234438655     4194304   82  Linux swap / Solaris

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1   976773167   488386583+  ee  GPT
Partition 1 does not start on a physical sector boundary.

Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1: 4294 MB, 4294967296 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 522 cylinders, total 8388608 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe33a2cd8

Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Code: Select all

leftseat@selous:~/recovered20140605/photorec$ sudo parted -l
Model: ATA INTEL SSDMCEAW12 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 120GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End    Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      1049kB  116GB  116GB   primary  ext4         boot
 2      116GB   120GB  4295MB  primary


Model: ATA HGST HTS725050A7 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End    Size   File system  Name     Flags
 1      1049kB  500GB  500GB               primary


Model: Linux device-mapper (crypt) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1: 4295MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop

Number  Start  End     Size    File system     Flags
 1      0.00B  4295MB  4295MB  linux-swap(v1)
I don't see GPT as a type option in "man mount", and I don't see an option to mount read-only in any of the GUI tools I'm aware of.

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong in trying to mount the hard drive read-only? Should I be using a different file system type?

Thanks very much in advance for your assistance.


Craig

craigh
Posts: 2
Joined: 05 Jun 2014, 17:48
Location: Vancouver, Canada

Re: Recovering a File from an Encrypted Disk

#2 Post by craigh »

While I was waiting for my first post to be approved, I found the answer:

Code: Select all

leftseat@selous:~$ sudo cryptsetup -r luksOpen /dev/sdb1 crypthome
[sudo] password for leftseat: 
Enter passphrase for /dev/sdb1: 
leftseat@selous:~$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/crypthome /romount
mount: block device /dev/mapper/crypthome is write-protected, mounting read-only
leftseat@selous:~$ cd /romount
leftseat@selous:/romount$ touch test
touch: cannot touch ‘test’: Read-only file system
leftseat@selous:/romount$
Now I have a new question, which I think I should post seperately.

Locked