Fedora Encrypted HDD broken : urgent problem
 

Have been using fedora 10 for some months now and last night turned the computer off quickly after turning it on by mistake.

The HDD is encrypted and usually asks for a password when its turned on to decrypt the HDD before allowing me to login.

Today there is nothing, no password request, just a black screen with a white flashing cursor.

Using a live CD i can attempt to access the HDD and it asks me for a password, but it tells me ive entered the wrong password.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

if its encrypted you're probably buggered to be honest. That's the way encryption works, so that someone can just take the hard drive. But I would run some hard disk tests on it from the BIOS, I would be surprised if its dead with the hard drives these days. If the BIOS tells you it's all good then..... this is rather odd.

Is this a private or an office computer? Is it possible that someone had access to computer during the night?

LinuxJournal has an interesting note about a possible case (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7743):

"So, can you trust your computer? Unless you carry it with you everywhere, you really can't. This is true even if the disks have been encrypted. Consider this scenario: someone steals your computer as you sleep. The thief makes a copy of the encrypted contents of the computer, even though they are useless to him without their encryption key. He then replaces the encrypted laptop contents with something a little more diabolical and puts the computer back. When you wake up the next day, the computer prompts for an encryption password as it does every morning. But this time when you provide the key it electronically transmits the key to the thief. Because he now has a copy of your data and key, he can read your files."

I know, this might sound a bit paranoid, but it's you who felt the need for encryption.

Arch Linux

Thanks for everybody's comments and help,

The problem was that i have 2 hard drives inside my computer and the system was trying to boot from the one the hard OS is not installed on.

Not sure what changed to make it want to do that but everything is now ok.