geli recovery

[Alaksiej C]

Your data is lost.

Explanation: some BIOSes do backup themselves on "unused" drives, at
the end of the HDD space (Google for "Host Protected Area"). The
criteria for detecting "unused" drive is first sector's contents
(AFAIK): is it MBR or not.

When you inserted your drive to that Windows box, BIOS decided it is
not used (no MB and backed itself up to it. As GELI's control block is
residing at the end of encrypted container, it is gone forever.

So, it's neither GELI's nor Windows bug, it is just dangerous BIOSes' feature.

--
Best regards,
Alaksiej


On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 3:16 PM, BSD Life <bsd4life at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> you are right, there should be no partition table at all ..
>
> # dd if=/dev/ada0 bs=512 skip=976773167 | hd
> 1+0 records in
> 1+0 records out
> 512 bytes transferred in 0.000687 secs (745137 bytes/sec)
> 00000000 24 47 41 46 52 10 41 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |$GAFR.A.........|
> 00000010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ef 57 38 3a 00 00 |...........W8:..|
> 00000020 00 00 00 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
> 00000030 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
> *
> 00000100 21 30 36 2f 32 39 2f 32 30 30 37 2d 50 33 35 2d |!06/29/2007-P35-|
> 00000110 49 43 48 39 2d 36 41 37 39 4f 47 30 4e 43 2d 30 |ICH9-6A79OG0NC-0|
> 00000120 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
> *
> 00000200
>
> This doesn't look like to be from geli.
> Any ideas?
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