Lost geli metadata

[Pawel Jakub Dawidek]

On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 10:52:24AM -0500, Nathan Wehr wrote:
> I have FreeBSD 8.0 installed on a machine with geli encrypting one of the hard drives. Most of what's on the drive I can live without, but there are a few important items that, unfortunately, don't exist elsewhere. When I try to attach the drive, I get the following message:
> 
> [root at baxter ~/]# geli attach -k /root/ad4.key /dev/ad4
> [root at baxter ~/]# Enter Passphrase: (I enter passphrase no problem, geli seems to attach)
> 
> [root at baxter ~/]# mount /dev/ad4.eli /private
> mount: /dev/ad4.eli : No such file or directory <-- This is the problem
> 
> The rest of this sad story is really just a long list of me making stupid mistakes. Here's a bit of history that might be helpful:
> 
> Mistake #1: Store non-backedup data on a backup drive that's encrypted. 
> 
> If I hadn't of made Mistake #1, losing all of my data would be far less heart-wrenching. However - and unfortunately - my mistakes do not end there. To start out with, I took out the CD/DVD drive from the machine to install it in a different one. After I did that, the drive label for the encrypted drive changed from ad4 to ad2. And of course geli wouldn't attach the drive and so I tried to use glabel. Needless to say, glabel didn't work. After that, I backed up the meta data (more like overwrote meta data that was already backed up when I originally encrypted the drive) that geli puts on the drive and then try to restore it after I insert the CD/DVD drive. 
> 
> This didn't work, and with a little bit of research, I found out that both geli and glabel both write data to the same place on the hard drive (the last sector). Which means that the backed up meta data which is at /var/backups/ad4.eli now contains data for glabel instead of geli. I read somewhere that the meta data for geli contains key information which doesn't make sense to me because I have the key stored at /root/ad4.key. So, my question... Is there any hope at recovering the information on the drive? If so, how? And, if not, why?

The /root/ad4.key file contains only a key that is being used to decrypt
the master key, which is stored in provider's last sector.

Ok, first of all, when you attach ad4 and it asks you for a passphrase,
it means that metadata is there. What is the output of:

	# geli dump /dev/ad4 | head

and what is the output after attaching of:

	# diskinfo -v /dev/ad4.eli

Also note that geli automatically creates metadata backup on 'geli init'
and stores it in /var/backups/ directory. Can you take a look if you
have files with .eli suffix on the machine you initialized geli for this
disk?

-- 
Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.wheelsystems.com
FreeBSD committer                         http://www.FreeBSD.org
Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!                     http://yomoli.com
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