Errors when trying to access encrypted hard drive from live

[nickmdowson]

Hi,

My laptop (Lenovo Yoga) with Debian Stretch (oldstable) and the KDE desktop yesterday froze and subsequently refused to boot. I have now formatted a live usb drive (also running Debian Stretch) which I have been able to boot into on the computer and I'm trying to access the data on my hard drive, encrypted with whole disk encryption. However I'm getting errors and would be grateful for any suggestions.

Initially when I tried to enter the encrypted drive in Dolphin it asked for my password before giving errors that included:

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Error spawning command-line 'cryptsetup luksOpen       Failed to execute child process "cryptsetup"

. Using answers elsewhere on the forum I then install cryptsetup, which seemed to help with this error. However I'm still getting this new error:

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An error occurred while accessing '118.5 GiB Encrypted Drive', the system responded: An unspecified error has occurred: No such interface 'org.freedesktop.UDisks2.Filesystem' on object at path /org/freedesktop/UDisks2/block_devices/dm_2d0

I then also installed lvm2, but this did not seem to help. Installing gave errors which suggested a possible firmware driver issue but this didn't seem to fit with the previous error:

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Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.24-11+deb9u4) ...
Processing triggers for systemd (232-25+deb9u12) ...
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.130) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.9.0-11-amd64
cryptsetup: WARNING: failed to detect canonical device of overlay
cryptsetup: WARNING: could not determine root device from /etc/fstab
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/bxt_dmc_ver1_07.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/skl_dmc_ver1_26.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_01.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/kbl_guc_ver9_14.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/bxt_guc_ver8_7.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/skl_guc_ver6_1.bin for module i915
live-boot: core filesystems devices utils udev wget blockdev dns.

Any further ideas for how I might be able to access my data?

For further background:

The freeze occurred yesterday while using the laptop when it became completely unresponsive including to ctrl-alt-f1 etc. I then did REISUB and this rebooted it but with a warning "no bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key".

At this point I was worried I had had a hard disk failure although after I managed to boot into a live usb, the system seemed to recognise the existence of different partitions on the hard drive so I'm hoping I may be able to recover data..I have backups but they're two-three weeks old.

This is what the partition tables look like:

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 lsblk
NAME                          MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
loop0                           7:0    0   2.3G  1 loop  /lib/live/mount/rootfs/filesyst
sda                             8:0    1   7.5G  0 disk  
└─sda1                          8:1    1   7.5G  0 part  /lib/live/mount/medium
nvme0n1                       259:0    0 119.2G  0 disk  
├─nvme0n1p1                   259:1    0   512M  0 part  
├─nvme0n1p2                   259:2    0   244M  0 part  
└─nvme0n1p3                   259:3    0 118.5G  0 part  
  └─luks-10938c4c-a882-48bb-880c-bba39bf953f5
                              254:0    0 118.5G  0 crypt 
    ├─port--of--tyne--vg-root 254:1    0 114.7G  0 lvm   
    └─port--of--tyne--vg-swap_1
                              254:2    0   3.9G  0 lvm   

My immediate priority is making a copy of my data before I try and work out what has gone wrong with the laptop!
Grateful for any pointers to how I can unencrypt the disk.
Many thanks.

[nickmdowson]

It seems that this error doesn't actually prevent access to the files:

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    An error occurred while accessing '118.5 GiB Encrypted Drive', the system responded: An unspecified error has occurred: No such interface 'org.freedesktop.UDisks2.Filesystem' on object at path /org/freedesktop/UDisks2/block_devices/dm_2d0

It's just that at this point you have to click through to the now unencrypted drive container (in my case this is listed as '114.6 GiB hard drive' instead of '118.5 GiB Encrypted Drive').

So solution to accessing encrypted files from a Live USB in Dolphin is:
1) install cryptsetup and lvm2
2) click to open the encrypted drive in Dolphin
3) enter password
4) Ignore above error message if it occurs
5) click through to the unencrypted drive that should have appeared.

Glad I've got my files back, now making an emergency backup before working out what to do with the installation - I may just reinstall as I needed to upgrade to new stable anyway but will see if I can find a way to do this while keeping my existing files intact on the disk!