Edit: Turns out you guys were right, I entered the setup password wrong for LUKs. I got this new Logitech keyboard I got for a gift and I type around 170wpm, but I’ve been having issues with it kind of lagging keys for some reason. What I did was I opened up a notepad and typed in my password a bunch of times and noticed whenever I would type something such as “stain” for example, it would come out at “stani” despite me looking at the keyboard and knowing that wasn’t what I was typing. So I encrypted my drive with the wrong password, but figured out how to decrypt it that way. Thanks for the help doods!

Hello! I have a external drive I’ve encrypted with LUKs that has irreplaceable backups of mine, and for some reason no matter which PC I try it won’t unlock despite it being the correct password. It doesn’t give me anything else in the terminal other than what I put in the title.

I recently just backed up everything onto the external drive from my computer cause I was distro hopping. It’s worked fine on my PC, I saved the password so I was able to mount it no problem before, but now it won’t mount on any other PC I try. It isn’t the end of the world since I can just try and copy old data from my computers drive before the format since I haven’t downloaded anything yet that could overwrite anything important, but I’d still like to be able to get this external drive unlocked. As I’ve said, irreplaceable files of mine are on it so I’m hoping to get it working. Thank you!

  • pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr
    16·
    2 days ago

    I once had a similar issue, caused by the keyboard layout in the os installer (when I defined the password) being different from the keyboard layout used for unlocking the drive. I quickly leaned to type my password in qwerty on my azerty keyboard and all is fine now.

    Another similar thing I’m thinking about is trying with caps lock, as you may have had it on when defining the password

  • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
    14·
    2 days ago

    I want to point out that it may be possible you mistyped the password when setting it up, and then repeated the same mistake when using the drive originally. I know I have done this when setting up passwords. There is definitely a tendency to repeatedly mistype something in the same way.

  • mufasio@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    Your password just unlocks the volume key which is used to decrypt/encrypt the data. It sounds like the volume key is on our PC, not the external drive. I don’t have much experience with LUKs and none with using it on an external drive, but I suspect that you will need to wipe the drive and set it up again while ensuring that the volume key is stored on the external drive itself.

    • frongt@lemmy.zip
      7·
      2 days ago

      The header is stored on the device, unless you specifically create a detached header.

    • helpmyusernamewontfi@lemmy.todayOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      but I suspect that you will need to wipe the drive and set it up again while ensuring that the volume key is stored on the external drive itself.

      Whenever I format a drive I just use Gnome Disks since it’s the easiest and it lets me encrypt it using LUKs as a option, I’ve never had an issue like this for years until now since whenever I’ve used Gnome Disks in the past it always lets me decrypt the drive on any other Linux machine

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
        4·
        2 days ago

        It is possible Gnome keyring holds the key, and the gnome password / key wallet is not unlocking during login. But I’m guessing. The error message sounds like the decryption key is not available

  • bacon_pdp@lemmy.world
    6·
    2 days ago

    Check the caps lock and the num luck lights on your keyboard; they are the leading causes of a failed password with the correct password

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 days ago

    Need more info:

    • How did you encrypt it in the first place
    • What command are you using to try and mount it now?
    • Do you have any other identifying LUKS info about the volume? (sudo blkid /dev/whatever)
    • helpmyusernamewontfi@lemmy.todayOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      I encrypted it using Gnome Disks, haven’t had any problems with it for years until now

      I tried mounting it normally with Dolphin on KDE Plasma, after it was giving me an error I tried unlocking it in terminal via sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda1 backups

      Here’s the output of the command you sent: /dev/sda1: UUID="109ffa3d-6181-43cf-a813-fdd285386866" TYPE="crypto_LUKS" PARTUUID="ac0402f1-01"

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 days ago

        Are you typing this passphrase by chance? Do you have it saved somewhere that you’re positive is correct?

        Try typing it out in a terminal window and see if it matches what you have saved. Special characters and incorrect keyboard mappings could be problematic.

  • Sophienomenal@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Hmm, what method did you use to back it up? It sounds to me like something got corrupted, though perhaps someone more experienced could identify a different issue. What I usually do to clone LUKS partitions is use a liveUSB (so no files change while backing up), then use cryptsetup to create a new LUKS partition on the backup drive if it’s a new drive (otherwise for incremental backups you can skip this step), then unlock both drives and rsync to the backup drive. This is also usually faster than pure cloning, as cloning would also copy the (encrypted) empty space in the partition, and for incremental backups, rsync will only copy the changed data so it’s much faster.

    This would also have the benefit of preventing corruption on transfer, because rsync uses checksums to verify the file was properly reconstructed in the new location, whereas something like dd won’t have the granularity to check per-file checksums (especially if used to clone a whole encrypted partition).