I've just had a serious hardware situation & I need to get data off the HDD in the dead box.

So - being new & ignorant in the *nix world, I just took the HDD & stuck it in my usb caddy & mounted it on another system. I can read it fine... MOSTLY!

But when I go to open the /home/ - where all the good stuff is... It tells me there are no files there. I think it must be encrypted in someway.

How do I get the key from the system?

Should I just do it the other way around? Put the HDD with the data I need into a machine & copy the data off to another HDD in the USB caddy?

Any suggestions?

there won't be any encrption, instead i'd assume you simply have a seperate /home partition, which you should do. you don't mount a hard drive, you mount each individual partition. i'd guess you've just mounted the first partition which happens to be your root partition. run "fdisk /dev/hde" or whatever your external drive has been listed under /dev/ as and you will see all the partitions there. /home would possibly be the fifth partition, i.e. the first inside an extended partition. mount that too.