[ale] grub rescue

[Rich Faulkner]

...and to think...Richard Stallman professed the use of "no password" as
a password to keep systems open and free.  Unfortunately the word
"ethical" is lost on too many in the world thus we are pressed to
encrypt our file systems.  

Glad you got your partition mounted and files copied!

As for making the drive bootable again...reinstall GRUB?

Rich


On Tue, 2012-02-21 at 15:28 -0500, John Pilman wrote:

> Here's an update on my progress with the scrambled partition table and
> encrypted home directory.
> Using dd I copied the hard drive and did the rest of this on the copy.
> I ran testdisk from a live boot usb flash drive and was able
> re-identify the unallocated partition as a linux partition and write
> the partition table.
> After a boot or two, gparted saw the partition as sda5.
> Long story short for now, Ubuntu 11.04 includes the ultility
> encryptfs-recover-private which was able to mount the encrypted
> /home/john and I have now copied my files.
> Caveat #1 - it took me a while to learn that my live boot usb Ubuntu
> 11.04 had to be 64 bit since my original partition was 64 bit.
> Caveat #2 - some of these steps were very time consuming.
> 
> I next plan to try to see if I can make the hard drive bootable again.
> 
> ...John
> 
> On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 4:05 PM, John Pilman <jcpilman at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks for the ideas. I am starting with a second hard drive and the
> > dd command as Derek said and I am going to try to recreate how I go
> > into this mess.  Understanding, at his point, is more valuable than
> > the little bit of data since my last last backup.
> >
> > To partially answer some questions:
> > The disk started with Windows 7 and I installed Ubuntu 10.10 with dual
> > boot.  So the partition utility is the one used during the Ubuntu
> > install.  Also, I vaguely remember a question about encryption during
> > that process.  I can't say for sure whether the partition or just the
> > home directory was encrypted.
> > Also, I'm not sure where the boot record was.
> >
> > If possible, I will reinstall everything and then find those answers.
> > At, the speed this dd is going, I have some free time to do more research.
> > ...John
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Jim Lynch
> > <ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com> wrote:
> >> On 02/18/2012 05:19 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:
> >>> Once you make your copy, try making all your unallocated space into a
> >>> single linux partition.  Then you can dd the first few MB off into a file
> >>> (running a RAMDISK rescue environment, of course) and use 'file' to see if
> >>> you got it right.  Were you using LVM?  Then from there you might be able
> >>> to get lucky and find your partition endpoints.
> >> Since you can now with grub2 boot from LVM that might be the answer.
> >> I'm surprised that grub didn't recognize that.  I'd find a live cd or
> >> Knopix cd that understands LVM and see if the partition contains LVM
> >> volumes before I did anything rash.
> >>
> >> Jim.
> >> _______________________________________________
> 
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