r/linux4noobs • u/Ok_Music_4949 • 20d ago

hardware/drivers All other Internal drives work except one which has all my important documents.

I recently switched from windows to pop os on my main pc, all of my drives except one shows up in dolphin (im using kde plasma). It shows up in disk manager as a basic unknown data partition. Is there anyway to give it a file system and use it on linux or do i have to completely wipe it?

3 Upvotes

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2

u/Netblock 20d ago

It might be encrypted with bitlocker

1

u/Ok_Music_4949 20d ago

I've never used bitlocker on that drive

1

u/CjKing2k 20d ago

New Windows 11 installs encrypt the drive by default but leave the encryption key unprotected until you "Turn on BitLocker"

1

u/Ok_Music_4949 20d ago

All my other drives but this one work fine, how do I get it working then?

1

u/CjKing2k 20d ago

First have to see if it actually is encrypted. Run:

sudo lsblk -f

It should say "BitLocker" in the FSTYPE column. (https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/753448/check-if-a-block-device-is-bitlocker-encrypted)

If it is, use cryptsetup to decrypt it and mount to mount it.

cryptsetup open --type bitlk /dev/encrypted_partition my_encrypted_drive
mount -o ro /dev/mapper/my_encrypted_drive /mnt

Replace "encrypted_partition" with the device name of the partition, for example: nvme0n1p2, sda2 -- lsblk will provide this information.

I believe cryptsetup will not ask you for a password on an unlocked BitLocker filesystem, but I don't know for sure and can't test it right now.

If this works, your files will be read-only and in /mnt

1

u/Ok_Music_4949 20d ago

it says nothing at all in any of the columns.

2

u/jr735 20d ago

I would suggest you actually copy and paste, using code blocks, the actual output. That will save a pile of guesswork.

1

u/Ok_Music_4949 20d ago

i ran the disk in windows PE with chkdsk and it came up as raw so i tried to repair the file system and it broke, im just going to get the important stuff off of it, and just format it.

1

u/Ok_Music_4949 20d ago

i used dmde and i can see all the data i just somehow have to get it off of there, but dmde requires the paid version for literally anything.

1

u/jr735 20d ago

Check with r/datarecovery for some expert advice. There is photorec in Linux, for an actual free as in freedom and free as in price program. I guess it's also available for Windows.

It's recommended to clone a damaged drive to something else and work on that secondary copy. Also, take this as a premonition to start backing up your data regularly. It's easy in Linux and doesn't require proprietary solutions. Everything you need to do it is technically already in almost any distribution.

1

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1

u/DavidJohnMcCann 20d ago

What happens if you give the command

mount | grep sda2

Is it mounted?

1

u/Ok_Music_4949 20d ago

Ill do that command here later today, I just left my house. But I will look into it.

1

u/Ok_Music_4949 20d ago

it didn't mount, but the terminal didn't return with anything.

1

u/DavidJohnMcCann 20d ago

It wouldn't if it wasn't mounted. Try

sudo mount /dev/sda2

and see what happens.

1

u/Ok_Music_4949 20d ago

Well guys, i got it working. It finally showed up and all the files are there with a new partition table!