3

A couple months back I had an old 350 gb Transcend external drive I forgot about and on a whim, installed Ubuntu on it. After using it for a couple months I decided to ditch Windows all together and installed Ubuntu on my laptop permanently, a decision I have no regrets over.

Now, the problem. There are some files on the external drive I want, the drive is encrypted. When I plug the drive in, it mounts, in the drive is an icon, Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop, when I double click it, a window pops up and closes so quickly I can not see what it is, I assumed it would prompt me for a password or something but it doesn't.

I have searched to try and find a solution, I am currently digging through my copy of the Linux Bible and other resources but have so far come up empty. I don't have the skills yet, but I'm working on it, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

enter image description here

d a i s y
  • 5,561
tooHigh
  • 31
  • If you connect it to your computer (internally or via eSATA or USB), you should be able to boot from it again. Do you remember the password/passphrase? Otherwise you have bad luck. It should also be possible to decrypt it manually without booting from it (as long as you remember the password/passphrase). – sudodus May 10 '18 at 03:47
  • Find out which command is executed by the .desktop file: open it with a text editor or execute cat /path/to/file.desktop in a terminal. There should be a line beginning with Exec=, that is the command that is run when you double click it. In a terminal, navigate to your external drive and run the command. Now you should be able to see what is going wrong. – danzel May 10 '18 at 08:42
  • Thank you for your help, I upgraded the system to 18.04 LTS and I was able to open it without any problems by clicking the .Desktop icon and entering the passphrase. Thanks again for the help. – tooHigh May 12 '18 at 17:43

0 Answers0