Hi,

I have an external USB-drive for confidential data that is LUKS-encrypted. The machine it was attached to recently died an untimely death, and I now need to mount and decrypt the LUKS partition from a different Linux machine. The dead machine was Centos 6.7 while the replacement is Centos 7.3

Is there any files I need from the old machine's root filesystem in order to be able to mount the LUKS-encrypted USB-disk on a new machine, or is it self-contained in the disk? (I have extracted the boot/root filesystem from the dead machine and have that disk now as another USB-drive in order to be able to salvage any OS-related files from it, in case that helps??)

I'm scared to destroy the mapping or data on the encrypted drive and thus would warmly welcome some advise here before I dare even connect it.

Thank you so much in advance!

I have an external backup USB drive that is LUKS encrypted. There are no issues in moving such disks to new machines and opening them if you have the passphrase. If you use a keyfile, you'll want to keep it, but all you need is the passphrase.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for quick and reassuring response!

When attaching the encrypted USB drive to the new machine, fdisk shows that it contains an LVM2_member. I seem to recall that this LVM2_member contains multiple volumes, where one of these is the LUKS-encrypted volume.

Doing cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb2 just tells me this is not a valid LUKS device.

I'm obviously beyond rusty at this, so thanks for your patience if you are still reading :-)
Guess the question now rather is how to handle the LVM2 volume on the drive.. do you have some advise for this as well?

Thanks a bunch so far!

Usually the newly attached volume group is found automatically, and the included LVs show up in the output from "lvs", but you might need to run "vgscan" manually if that didn't happen. If the LV shows up but is not activated (no "a" flag in the attributes), then you'll need to run "vgchange -ay /dev/{VGNAME}" to make the LVs show up in /dev/mapper.

Possible issues:

• There were other drives that were part of the VG. You can use the "--activationmode partial" option in the vgchange command to activate just the LVs that are completely contained on this disk.
• Your LVM setups were configured by old installers that used the same default VG names. You will need to use the vgrename command to give the new VG a name that does not conflict with your current VG names.

1 members found this post helpful.

That did the trick! Thank you kindly!