[SOLVED] External HDD not working after being unplugged for 5 months

[stayfrothin]

So I recently went on holidays for 5 months and decided to unplug my 3tb Seagate Backup Plus Desktop external HDD from its power source and put it away while I was overseas. Since I've returned home and plugged it back in, nothing has come up. No lights or drive recognition on the comp. I moved the plug to a different power source and still nothing.

I decided to take it out of the case and plug directly into the sata ports and it fired up and was recognized by the computer. Unfortunately it came up with instructions to reformat. As I'm not sure when the last time I backed it up onto my backup SSHD I still want to look at the files to make sure before reformatting the drive.

I read on another thread that the reformatting is required because of an encryption that is used through the Seagate controller on the external HDD. Is there anyway around this encryption to get to the files? Or do I have to try and get this controller to work to plug the HDD back in to get to the files?

Cheers

 

[audiospecaccts]

I don't know if would need to install Ubuntu, or just test the os on the install cd and open up a terminal window. But:
If you can't mount this drive through the desktop (by double clicking it) its encrypted/password protected.

1. in a terminal window, lets find the drive:


sudo fdisk -l

list the drives connected. usb drives are sbdxx but in your case since its on the sata controller sdaxx wher xx is the number (I'll use sda2 in the example)

2. now we are going to manually mount it. This is the command we pass normally on the external hard disk, but it should work. :

sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 external
mkdir -p /media/SEAGATE
sudo mount /dev/mapper/external /media/SEAGATE


EDIT:

If this doesn't work, I'll walk you through retrieving the master encryption key and bypass all passwords to access the files on the drive directly.

know you know why drive encryption is a useless feature that is more of a security compromise than a protection. But that can be said for all forms of "encryption".

 

[stayfrothin]

I don't know if would need to install Ubuntu, or just test the os on the install cd and open up a terminal window. But:
If you can't mount this drive through the desktop (by double clicking it) its encrypted/password protected.

1. in a terminal window, lets find the drive:


sudo fdisk -l

list the drives connected. usb drives are sbdxx but in your case since its on the sata controller sdaxx wher xx is the number (I'll use sda2 in the example)

2. now we are going to manually mount it. This is the command we pass normally on the external hard disk, but it should work. :

sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 external
mkdir -p /media/SEAGATE
sudo mount /dev/mapper/external /media/SEAGATE


EDIT:

If this doesn't work, I'll walk you through retrieving the master encryption key and bypass all passwords to access the files on the drive directly.

know you know why drive encryption is a useless feature that is more of a security compromise than a protection. But that can be said for all forms of "encryption".

Ok got ubuntu and followed the instructions, but I'm getting "mkdir: cannot create directory ' /media/SEAGATE ' : Permission denied" after that second line. Anything I'm doing wrong there?