On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 10:52:24AM -0500, Nathan Wehr wrote: > I have FreeBSD 8.0 installed on a machine with geli encrypting one of the > hard drives. Most of what's on the drive I can live without, but there are a > few important items that, unfortunately, don't exist elsewhere. When I try to > attach the drive, I get the following message: > > [root@baxter ~/]# geli attach -k /root/ad4.key /dev/ad4 > [root@baxter ~/]# Enter Passphrase: (I enter passphrase no problem, geli > seems to attach) > > [root@baxter ~/]# mount /dev/ad4.eli /private > mount: /dev/ad4.eli : No such file or directory <-- This is the problem > > The rest of this sad story is really just a long list of me making stupid > mistakes. Here's a bit of history that might be helpful: > > Mistake #1: Store non-backedup data on a backup drive that's encrypted. > > If I hadn't of made Mistake #1, losing all of my data would be far less > heart-wrenching. However - and unfortunately - my mistakes do not end there. > To start out with, I took out the CD/DVD drive from the machine to install it > in a different one. After I did that, the drive label for the encrypted drive > changed from ad4 to ad2. And of course geli wouldn't attach the drive and so > I tried to use glabel. Needless to say, glabel didn't work. After that, I > backed up the meta data (more like overwrote meta data that was already > backed up when I originally encrypted the drive) that geli puts on the drive > and then try to restore it after I insert the CD/DVD drive. > > This didn't work, and with a little bit of research, I found out that both > geli and glabel both write data to the same place on the hard drive (the last > sector). Which means that the backed up meta data which is at > /var/backups/ad4.eli now contains data for glabel instead of geli. I read > somewhere that the meta data for geli contains key information which doesn't > make sense to me because I have the key stored at /root/ad4.key. So, my > question... Is there any hope at recovering the information on the drive? If > so, how? And, if not, why?
The /root/ad4.key file contains only a key that is being used to decrypt
the master key, which is stored in provider's last sector.
Ok, first of all, when you attach ad4 and it asks you for a passphrase,
it means that metadata is there. What is the output of:
# geli dump /dev/ad4 | head
and what is the output after attaching of:
# diskinfo -v /dev/ad4.eli
Also note that geli automatically creates metadata backup on 'geli init'
and stores it in /var/backups/ directory. Can you take a look if you
have files with .eli suffix on the machine you initialized geli for this
disk?
--
Pawel Jakub Dawidek http://www.wheelsystems.com
FreeBSD committer http://www.FreeBSD.org
Am I Evil? Yes, I Am! http://yomoli.com
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