How do I unsave a Gnome-saved password of my ext3 external USB hard-drive?

simonsharry · 02-14-2009, 10:24 PM

Hello,

I have got an external USB hard-drive with ext3 filesystem. Whenever I would power-on/plug-in this drive, I would be prompted for a password dialog with an additional option to save my password. Tired of entering my password upon every power-on, I decided to save my password one day. However, I now want to go back to the old setting... where I had to manually enter my password. How do I do that?

I first tried changing my old user password ('xxx', that got saved by Gnome/Linux <somewhere>) to something fresh and new ('yyy'), hoping that Gnome/Linux would recognize the password mismatch (between 'xxx' and 'yyy') and prompt me, once again, for the correct/new password. However, Gnome/Linux did nothing! To be able to work in the interim, I have restored my user account password to 'xxx'.

Would greatly appreciate your response. Fyi,
1. my usb drive currently appears mounted as:
/dev/dm-2 on /media/bkupdrive type ext3 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal)
2. I'm using Fedora 9, version - 2.6.27.12-78.2.8.fc9.i686.

Secondly, I'm only now realizing this... My current user id (corresponding to my username 'harry') is 500 in /etc/passwd. Would, then, this mean that if I take my external drive to another user's system/network where I do not have an account just yet, I must request for an account with a userid of 500 in order to be able to access my drive's contents? This may not always be administratively/politically possible, so what are my options here?

Many thanks in advance.
Regards,
/HS

JulianTosh · 02-14-2009, 11:03 PM

As for the gnome password, I believe you need the gnome-keyring-manager package:

su --command="yum -y install gnome-keyring-manager"

simonsharry · 02-15-2009, 01:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Admiral Beotch

As for the gnome password, I believe you need the gnome-keyring-manager package:

su --command="yum -y install gnome-keyring-manager"

Looks like, I'm in big trouble now!
I installed the package. Launched the gnome-keyring-manager app. Deleted the one and only key listed there. Now, the password prompter sure comes up, but I CANNOT get it to accept my original password. Please note that the drive is ext3 and encrypted... so please, PLEASE... HELP!!!

Do I need to manually create /dev/dm-2 somehow???

JulianTosh · 02-15-2009, 02:02 AM

I'm gonna go ahead and say you're screwd at this point. But if you're not willing to give up just yet...

Stop using your computer RIGHT NOW. Boot up with some kind of recovery LiveCD - "Recovery Is Possible", perhaps. and start searching your hard drive for "GnomeKeyring"

Capture everything within a couple hundred bytes of that string and attempt to rebuild the file by hand.

ProTip:
'mv {} {}.backup' is generally better than 'rm {}'
and
I pitty da foo dat dont backup his shizzle.

JulianTosh · 02-15-2009, 02:04 AM

Once you get RIP booted, login and do something like this:

grep --binary-files=text -200 "GnomeKeyring" /dev/hda > /tmp/ohCrap.txt

Where hda is the device of your hard drive.

simonsharry · 02-15-2009, 02:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Admiral Beotch

Once you get RIP booted, login and do something like this:

grep --binary-files=text -200 "GnomeKeyring" /dev/hda > /tmp/ohCrap.txt

Where hda is the device of your hard drive.

Hey friend -
I have created a separate thread just for this...
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...b-disk-704755/

I can boot my computer just fine. It's only this external ext3 encrypted disk that I somehow need to get access to (once again). Is it possible to manually mount this thing again somehow... using device mapper and stuff (I don't fully understand the concept, but can follow instructions if you/someone could provide).

I have only myself to blame for what I did.