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Hi all
I have an encrypted external drive. I did set this up under Debian a while back. The filesystem is exFAT. (Was ext4 all along)
I can unencrypt the drive (i have the correct passphrase). As of right now i am doing all operations within Dolphin.
Unfortunately some files are unreadable because some filenames are in french with french accents (à é è ê and the likes). When i try to copy entire directories, Dolphin reports some files cannot be copied because the source does not exist and the accented character is replaced with a diamond with a ? in the middle.
This :
So files like "quantité_de_blé.txt" are read as "quantit_de_bl.txt" and can neither be copied or read. I can see them in Dolphin but when i try to open them they are empty.
Because i don't want to break anything i safely removed my drive and came here to ask for help if you know what i can do to fix this. The previous installation of Debian and this installation of Arch both are in en_US with the fr_CA keyboard as second keyboard and i am unsure why Dolphin cannot interpret these characters.
Let me know what you think
Last edited by Quardah (2023-02-13 01:59:36)
ThinkPad P16s AMD / KDE
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It could be a charset issue, but it sounds strange since as far as I'm aware, exfat is pretty much locked to unicode / utf16 / utf8 anyhow. And arch kernel uses utf8 by default.
CONFIG_EXFAT_FS=m
CONFIG_EXFAT_DEFAULT_IOCHARSET="utf8"
You can check /proc/mounts if there was a different/wrong iocharset set as a mount option.
As an alternative to the kernel exfat implementation there is also exfat-fuse maybe that can make sense of it. You can also try it with Debian.
Try to mount it read-only though. If in doubt, you can also make a ddrescue copy of the entire partition first.
Last edited by frostschutz (2023-01-16 10:00:05)
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Thank you for your response. I will try investigating this weekend and keep you posted.
ThinkPad P16s AMD / KDE
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Hey man sorry for the super late reply. Actually it was only a single directory with issues and i have not been capable of understanding why. Fortunately, i could read the 4 files with corrupted names from terminal.
Terminal was capable of displaying broken names. Like "Métiers.txt" was "'M'$'\351''tiers.txt'"
I am unaware why this happened but i managed to cat them in a Recovery.txt file and now i have my data safe and sound.
If anyone comes across this issue later, the steps to recover your data is simple :
1 - When connecting the encrypted drive, Dolphin will try to mount it and ask for the passphrase. Enter the proper passphrase.
2 - From there copy the mount path in Dolphin
3 - In a terminal, `cd` into this path
4 - `ls -alF` will print the broken names
5 - `cat` the files with the broken names and your data should show up.
I hope this helps people.
Closed.
ThinkPad P16s AMD / KDE
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