I have done a dump on both partitions. No sign of LUKS :-( Nothing there. Its all gone. I must have had finger trouble or something and wiped/partitioned the wrong drive. Oh well that will teach me to concentrate when using fdisk!! Thanks for your help. Cheers On 27 May 2010 18:13, Uwe Menges <uwe.menges@xxxxxx> wrote: > On 05/27/2010 02:46 PM, fred smith wrote: >> I am desperate to try to recover this disk - it has important stuff on >> it. Any suggestions or pointers? > > A good start would be to get some things straight. In your first email > you eg. left open if /dev/sdc1 or /dev/sdc2 is the partition supposed to > be encrypted. A bit of history would probably also help (initial > partition layout, what you did that it's different now, etc.). > >> I know the passphrase, but is there any way of recover the first part >> of the partition? I have attached the drive via an external interface >> and 'gparted' shows: >> >> /dev/sdb1 fat32 200MiB first sector 40 last sector 409689 >> /dev/sdb2 hfs+ 931.19GiB first sector 409640 > > Does not look good to me, because (sdb2 first sector) < (sdb1 last sector). > > You could scan the disk for LUKS header (eg. here "hexdump -C /dev/sda2 > | less" shows that the first bytes are "LUKS" (4c 55 4b 53)). > > "testdisk" may also help. Good practice is to always work on a copy of > the disk to recover, not the original. > > If you have lost the LUKS header, recovery is impossible, because that's > exactly what crypto stuff is for. Reconsider your backup strategy. > > Yours, Uwe > _______________________________________________ > dm-crypt mailing list > dm-crypt@xxxxxxxx > http://www.saout.de/mailman/listinfo/dm-crypt > _______________________________________________ dm-crypt mailing list dm-crypt@xxxxxxxx http://www.saout.de/mailman/listinfo/dm-crypt