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I'm new around here and I'm not sure if this is the right place to post. I was recently asked to bring in a used server from another site of ours. On booting, I found that it has been encrypted using LUKS. No one (either at our Head Office or the site in question) knows the password and the sysadmin who was incharge has since quit.

To complicate matters, backups were never taken of the data in this server, so essentially I think I'm screwed. I googled around quite a bit and most of them seem to be saying that recovery isn't possible - as stated here.

Eventually, I stumbled upon this question in Superuser and according to that, I deleted the entry from crypttab from the troubleshoot mode and now it boots, but the data required is in the partition that is encrypted.

How do I recover my Data from the encrypted partition?

PS: I have backed all the other data, just in case.

Thanks in advance

Community
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rahuL
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    An example of asking w/o question — what is it, finally? – poige Feb 27 '13 at 11:02
  • sorry.. editted it now. I NEED to recover the data from that encrypted partition. – rahuL Feb 27 '13 at 11:17
  • Ok, again, you know it's encrypted, it's LUKS, you have googled and suspect recovery is impossible, so what's the point to ask "how do I recover"? O_o Just to get an answer saying "You recover it doing an impossible", or what? :) – poige Feb 27 '13 at 11:27

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If the data on the system has sufficient value that you have to recover it then contact the previous sysadmin and ask them for the password, if necessary pay them. If you can't / won't contact the previous sysadmin (or they can't remember the password) then you're not getting the data back.

user9517
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  • Just so you know, recovered the data for the other partitions and did a low-level format. Thanks for the assist – rahuL Mar 01 '13 at 10:04