Yesterday I did a fresh installation of Ubuntu 14.10 over Ubuntu 14.04 and now I am not able to decrypt my home folder. I had two separate partitions: / and /home.
I formatted my / partition but kept my /home partition. Now I am not able to log in to my account. I get following error:
signature not found in user keyring perhaps try the interactive 'ecryptfs-mount-private'.
When I try ecryptfs-mount-private command, it tells me that my login passphrase is wrong. I am using my password as my login passphrase. I haven't changed my password for a long long time, and my current password is same as my old password. So I am not sure why it is not working. When I try ecryptfs-verify -p command, it tells me that the configuration is invalid with error:
ERROR: Mount point [/home/$USER] is user's home
ERROR: Configuration invalid
While ecryptfs-verify -h doesn't give any error. What am I doing wrong?
I did save my mount passphrase as well but when I try to use it from live usb using ecryptfs-recover-private, I get success but the mounted directory is still encrypted.
Best Answer
I was finally able to decrypt my home folder and recover my data. These are the steps I followed:
/home/$USERto/home/$USER_oldmkhomedir_helpercommandwrapped-passphrasefile using the same password I was trying before:ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase /home/$USER_old/.ecryptfs/wrapped-passphraseand voila, now I am able to unwrap it which I was not able to do before, neither when I was logged in text mode nor when I was trying to do it from live USB! And it turns out that the mount passphrase I had saved was not the same as the one wrapped in
wrapped-passphrasefile! And now that I look into it, thewrapped-passphrasefile was changed just last month although I have been using the same login password for years! Anyway...