LUKs backup drive shows as "free space" on Ubuntu 20.04....can someone help?

LovingCoffee

12/26/23, 2:07 AM

I am on Ubuntu 20.04. I have a backup hard drive that is encrypted with LUKs. I recently installed a third drive and installed Win11. I was trying to access the LUKs drive from within Win11, and obviously...although it sees it, it won't mount it. So, I booted back into Ubuntu and now my LUKs drive shows as being free space, I can't mount it, and it doesn't recognize it as a LUKs encrypted drive. I didn't format it, or take any action on the drive itself, am I screwed, or is there some way to get the system to recognize the drive as a LUKs drive?

UPDATE:

Running

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb

shows

disklabel type: gpt

But...running

sudo file -s /dev/sdb

shows

/dev/sdb: DOS/MBR

This seems unusual. Hoping someone smarter than me can help!

Let me know what additional information I can provide, please.

Update:

Thanks everyone for the help so far. I saw other people do a hexdump to help them recover their drive. I ran the following command, and got the following output, could anyone advise me on the potential for recovery? Not sure if I am allowed to offer this here...but if someone is able to successfully help me recover, I'd be happy to make a donation to them via Paypal / Venmo, etc. Please let me know if this is not allowed here. I appreciate everyone's help!

sudo hexdump -C /dev/sda | grep LUKS

Output: 166f6720 21 90 72 67 c0 56 0a 62 02 4c 55 4b 53 59 58 c8 |!.rg.V.b.LUKSYX.|

0 + 4

encryption

luks

LovingCoffee

12/26/23, 2:17 AM

UPDATE: Running sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb shows disklabel type: gpt But...running sudo file -s /dev/sdb shows /dev/sdb: DOS/MBR This seems unusual Hoping someone smarter than me can help!

user68186

12/26/23, 5:49 AM

Please [edit your question](https://askubuntu.com/posts/1447273/edit) and add all updates in your question. The comments are mainly for us to ask for clarifications.

user68186

12/26/23, 6:03 AM

I suspect when you tried to access the LUKS partition from Windows, it messed the partition up.

oldfred

12/26/23, 4:06 PM

For gpt related issues, I prefer gdisk. http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ Sometimes just running it and using w to write tables (if correct) updates things. Windows in old BIOS/MBR mode was known to not correctly write logical Linux partitions on changes. But UEFI/gpt has not had those issues.

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EN: LUKs backup drive shows as "free space" on Ubuntu 20.04....can someone help?

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