I can unlock the persistent drive with my passphrase - but when I then try to mount I get an error. Perhaps you might share that error with us "Sandy"?

@1: I'm not sure what you're missing. "Sandy" only seems to have omitted his UUIDs - which seems fair enough.

From the description it seems that "Sandy" may have corrupted the superblock. Perhaps by prematurely withdrawing his stick.

Also if I use the check file system/repair it tells me the File System is NOT clean - left it running for ages (3 hours) and nothing.

Which tool was that? How did you invoke it? What output does it give? (Was this the info you were missing comment 1?)

Thank you for your replies. I fear I have lost some extremely important documents - most other documents can be retrieved elsewhere - but a few crucial ones cannot unless I can somwhow get the persistent volume to load and copy the documents.

Anyway - I posted the error message - I just left out the number/id strings which I thought were meaningless. For example: "uuid-2e6000a3-97f5-4598-ba9a-541189a3ef08-uid1000 is write-protected"

Anyway - I was using the Disk Utility that comes with TAIL (Applications - System Tools - Disk Utility) - I selected the USB and saw the 30Gb Encrypted Partition - used the unlock voulme - entered passphrase - it opened - I then selected the newly shown 30GB TailsData volume and hit the check filesystem option - which should check and repair - it was this that hang for 3 hours and reported that the volume NOT Clean - no other information.

Please help - getting desparate and despairing now!!

Do you think if I tried to install an older version of TAILS (previous) it will help sort this out?

I have tried the USB in three different computers - all the same probelm.

I suspect a 'superblock' corruption maybe a cause - certainly I never pulled the USB out wrongly before the error - if it is a bad sector effecting the header info needed to mount the voulume is there any repair for this eventuality?

Is there a way via the filesystem (given the volume will not mount) were I could access the volume - with passphrase?

I am not an expert - so am not that familar with terminal commands - but have used terminal on another system as sudo - however, if there is anyway via terminal that you know - please treat me as a idiot and tell me step by step the commands.

Lstly - I did read somewhere that I could try a back-up the volume (make a copy) BLOCK BY BLOCK - how the hell do you do that? I assume by copying you can try and repair/open it on another system - such as Ubuntu or Mint.

Many Thanks

Sandy

Thanks Sandy

You can try this method to recover your files: unlock the partition (as you already did) then run a disk recovery tool on it.

Here's the step-by-step howto:

1. Start Tails. Be sure to set a root password in the greeter;
2. Connect to Internet
3. Open a terminal
4. Run "sudo apt-get update" and wait while downloading package lists
5. Run "sudo apt-get install testdisk"
6. Use the Gnome Disk Manager to unlock the encrypted partition. Then click on the "TailsData" block and look at the value of the "device" attribute in the description. It will probably be /dev/dm-0
7. From Nautilus, mount a partition on your HDD, or an external HDD, or some other media. You will put recovered file here;
8. In a terminal, run "sudo photorec"
9. Select the /dev/dm-0 device, or whatever you found on step 6
10. Select "non-partitioned"
11. Select the "TailsData" partition. Before hitting "enter", you can go to the "File Opt" entry on the bottom to restrict search to some specific file types
12. Select ext2/ext3 as filsystem
13. Select to scan the whole disk
14. Select a folder in the HDD you mounted before. To reach it, select ".." twice, then "/media", then the name of the disk (as it appears in Nautilus - for example, "sandy"), then, if you want, some subfolder. When you're ok press Y
15. Search should start, wait for it to finish. It will take minutes (possibly a lot of minutes)
16. In the folder you selected (let's say it was /media/sandy, without subfolders), there will be a number of new "recup_dir.N" subfolders, with N counting from 1 up. You still can't open them because of permissions
17. In a terminal, run "sudo chmod -R 777 /media/sandy/recup_dir.*" to fix permissions (replace /media/sandy with the actual path you used!!!)
18. Now you can browse the "recup_dir.N" folders. If you're lucky, your documents are there (together with lots of useless file fragments)

Hope you solve your problem!

Alessandro

Hi Alessandro,

My word - what an angel you are. I am really grateful to you for the unselfish way you gave up some of your time to post the detailed help for me (and no doubt others) that helped me sort my problem.

Your solution worked - I was very anxious to attempt this - but your guidance was perfect and I followed it step by step and ended up with a massive amout of retrieved files - even ones I though I had deleted and many fracments.

However, after searching through the many retrieved files I eventually found my important documents. I have now backed then up and backed them up again.

I am extremely grateful and appreciative of help.

Thank You

Sandy

Glad to see this worked!

I'm happy to know that you solved your problem, Sandy :)

Alessandro

You are the man Alessandro!