After changing harddrives I needed to transfer some files from the old harddrive which had an encrypted home directory. The command
sudo ecryptfs-recover-private
did not work:
sudo ecryptfs-recover-private /home/.ecryptfs/user/.ecryptfs/ INFO: Found [/home/.ecryptfs/user/.ecryptfs/]. Try to recover this directory? [Y/n]: INFO: Found your wrapped-passphrase Do you know your LOGIN passphrase? [Y/n] INFO: Enter your LOGIN passphrase... Passphrase: Inserted auth tok with sig [f7402d552edaa194] into the user session keyring mount: mount(2) failed: No such file or directory ERROR: Failed to mount private data at [/tmp/ecryptfs.p3BXsWqk].
http://askubuntu.com/a/36783 pointed me in the right direction. First mount the old hard drive in the new Ubuntu installation. Then run
sudo ecryptfs-add-passphrase --fnek
to add the corresponding passphrase (32 digits). Remember the second sig and mount your directory with
sudo mount -t ecryptfs /mnt/oldhome/.ecryptfs/me/.Private /mnt/oldme
You will need to answer some questions. The suggested default works except for the following two questions:
Enable filename encryption (y/n) [n]: y
and
Filename Encryption Key (FNEK) Signature [aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa]: bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
In my case some warnings were shown saying that encryption may not have worked properly and if mounting should continue. Despite those warnings all files were accessible.