Ubuntu – Trying to mount old encrypted home

ecryptfs

I installed a fresh Ubuntu 10.10 onto a new hard drive and want to mount the old home directory to a subdirectory of my new (also encrypted) home directory.

I tried this with sudo mount -t ecryptfs /mnt/oldhome/me/ /home/me/oldhome, with /mnt/oldhome being the /home partition of the old system.

Afterwards ~/oldhome contains a desktop link file (Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop) linking to ecryptfs-mount-private and a README.txt saying I should run ecryptfs-mount-private. I do so, but as I don't know what is supposed to happen, I can't tell if it happens and if it brings me closer to accessing my old home.

Any hints?

update

I was able to mount my old encrypted home with the help of this script. Though, looking into it with ls, I get alot of errors like this:

ls: cannot access /mnt/oldme/some_file: No such file or directory

Other information ls -l should show, is replaced by question marks.

update 2

I mounted the old system to /mnt/oldroot and mount /dev, /sys, /proc and the old home partition into. Then I chrooted into /mnt/oldroot, su - me and ecryptfs-mount-private. Asked for the passphrase I put it in and got:

Error: Unwrapping passphrase and inserting into the user session keyring failed [-5]
Info: Check the system log for more information from libecryptfs
ERROR: Your passphrase is incorrect

ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase gives me the exact same passphrase I used, though.

Best Answer

I strongly recommend that you use the ecryptfs-recover-private utility in these cases.

A full explanation of how to use it is available here.