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I checked the full disk encryption (and home dir) options when instlling Ubuntu 15.04 on a thumb drive. The installation was done as you would do on a HDD. It works fine.

However, i plugged the thumb drive in a ubuntu laptop (normal HDD install) to copy some files to it. It sees the encrypted partition well and asks for a password but either says there is no recnogniseble file system after taking the password or that there is no apprpriate key for this password (bad password in this case I suppose)

So, what i'm doing wrong? I just want to use the free space on this thumb drive and copy files to it from other ubuntu PCs.

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I'm not sure but if the Linux system you are moving the thumb drive too isn't running gnome the key may not work automatically.

Ensure your 'other' desktop has the following packages.

sudo apt-get install cryptsetup

See http://www.howtogeek.com/115955/how-to-quickly-encrypt-removable-storage-devices-with-ubuntu/ for further info.

The official Ubuntu page is https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedFilesystemsOnRemovableStorage

Where you also need to install the gnome disk utility, if you are connecting with gnome.

Looking at the 'expert' section you can use

dmesg | tail -20

To confirm that the disk is being correctly recognised.

I would recommend reading the official help page if you continue to have problems. Otherwise post your dmesg output into your question, and drop a comment to this answer if you need more help.

Reading to the end of the help page if the username on the 'other' system is not the same as on your 'main' one you may need to ensure that the username and group of /media/disk is correctly set. See the very bottom of the Ubuntu help page for more info.

If your other system isn't runny gnome by default head to the Debian help page http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/howto-disk-encryption-with-dm-crypt-luks-and-debian which from a quick scan should be desktop agnostic. Note however it is more command line oriented, so you may need to 'be brave' and not panic.

As I say post a comment if yo get problems. Dave.

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  • Both the USB and PC installs are Ubuntu 15.04
    – user240891
    May 28, 2015 at 15:46
  • @user240891 mpt what I meant, sorry if I wasn't clear. You have the main system that you created the USB drive on (I assume 15.04 from your comment) and you have the 'guest' system that you have moved your USB drive to (I called this the 'other' in the answer). Can you confirm that all the systems have cryptsetup installed. Also compare the output from dmesg on the 2 systems.
    – DaveM
    May 28, 2015 at 17:57
  • I understand now! :) Both of them are default and clean Ubuntu 15.04 installs, so if that is additional install it is not there. "Disks" app sees the partition as encrypted and offers me to decrypt it by entering a password but doesn't work. Says filesystem is unrecognized or something like that after entering the pass. Same happens in nautilius..
    – user240891
    May 30, 2015 at 8:18
  • In which case it may be a lack of cryptsetup on the second system, or an issue with permissions on the /media/disk - do you use the same username pass combo on both machines ? The Debian help page (linked in my answer) says something about the user and group needing to be correct. So check that also.
    – DaveM
    May 30, 2015 at 15:30

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