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#1 2023-01-16 04:51:06

Quardah
Member
Registered: 2014-08-26
Posts: 146

[Solved] ext4 encrypted drive issue with accents

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 smile

Last edited by Quardah (2023-02-13 01:59:36)


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#2 2023-01-16 09:58:56

frostschutz
Member
Registered: 2013-11-15
Posts: 1,409

Re: [Solved] ext4 encrypted drive issue with accents

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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#3 2023-01-21 07:11:29

Quardah
Member
Registered: 2014-08-26
Posts: 146

Re: [Solved] ext4 encrypted drive issue with accents

Thank you for your response. I will try investigating this weekend and keep you posted. smile


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#4 2023-02-13 01:58:02

Quardah
Member
Registered: 2014-08-26
Posts: 146

Re: [Solved] ext4 encrypted drive issue with accents

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.

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