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Needing to get into a laptop that says Please unlock disk sda3_crypt without losing any information that might be on here. The person this laptop belonged to is no longer with us, and really need to see what is on here.

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    If they did not provide the password for you, then there is almost no way to really decrypt the device and access the information. This is, after all, the point of full disk encryption, to be unable to get into the device without the proper codes.
    – Thomas Ward
    Dec 2, 2019 at 16:49
  • It's important for folks who ask these questions to understand that "encryption" is not some kind of super-password. The data is shattered and mixed together like the pieces of a thousand jigsaw puzzles, almost-but-not-quite at random. It's encrypted. The only hope of reassembling any of the puzzles is to know the pattern...and that pattern is based upon the password. It's not an access password - it's part of the key necessary to decrypt the random static back into pictures.
    – user535733
    Dec 2, 2019 at 18:21

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Without the password of the user in question used for encryption, there is no real way to decrypt the device and access the information. This is the point of Full Disk Encryption (FDE) - without the password needed to decrypt, there's no way to decrypt the content, so if you don't have the password you're not going to be able to get past the decryption prompt.

To that end, there is also no 'backdoor access' to an encrypted drive/partition if it was not set up with a secondary password that you had at the time. As such, there is no way to 'remove' FDE or bypass it without the password.

Unless you miraculously discover the password, you're going to be having to just 'guess' passwords until one works, or 'give up' because there's no way to remove the encryption (and the data on the system is gone forever as a result).

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