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Mounting LUKS Encrypted Volumes/Partitions

NOTICE

If you have lost or do not remember the passphrase you set, your data is just gone and there is nothing that can be done about it. Dont even ask.

Using LVM

If you are also using LVM then all of the steps found in that how-to EXCEPT issuing the mount command must be done first. The LVM must be prepped prior to your decrypting it. A change should also be noted that with LVM instead of decrypting something like /dev/sda3 you instead will find the volume to decrypt in /dev/mapper.

You will have to do this manually, as the script that is in place in the LVM how-to automatically mounts the appropriate LVM volumes. If you use that script anyways and things dont work, dont say you haven't been warned.

Mounting/Decrypting

From the livecd you will need to go root, on the livecd the password for root is root.

$ su 
Password: 

Next we will need a little information, namely which partition that the encrypted volume is on. If you have used encryption and LVM together you will have to mount the LVM first as documented elsewhere. For now, if you dont know or remember which partition you installed on we need to find out.

# fdisk -lu 

There is no real way to see which exactly is the encrypted partition. What we can do here is look to see which is the largest partition with a linux type. If you have a single linux install, then typically this will be the largest partition listed as linux in the table. In other words look at how many blocks each has.

Now that we have it we can set up to mount it.

cd /mnt
mkdir enc

This made a mount point that we can use in a moment. Next we get to actually get the system to recognize and make the partition usable.

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/ encrypted

Note that the <> are not used in the actual command /dev/sda2 is an example of what you might put there. We also assigned a name to it, that will come in handy in a moment.

Finally we will mount the volume with:

# mount /dev/mapper/encrypted /mnt/enc

There we go, your volume is mounted. You now have access your data, make changes, chroot in, or whatever else that you needed to access the volume from the outside. Once you are done with whatever it was make sure to cleanly unmount the volume with :

umount /mnt/enc
cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/encrypted

Have a great one ~Az