Trying to open vhdx volume containing luks encrypted partition with bruteforce-luks

[divajsz]

Hi All,

I have an old hard drive from the late 2000' (maybe 2010', cant remember) and I have a filesystem on it which has been created with FreeOTFE, which has been a windows alternative for luks encryption. Back in the day I used ubuntu mainly and used this drive as a backup.

Unfortunately I have forgotten the password, but I still have the drive itself.

I tried to figure out the password but as many of my other hdd's I am worried about the drive itself if it will brake down due old hardware therefore I made a vhdx copy of it

Since bruteforce-luks is for linux I have a debian console on my win10 laptop, and I compiled the bruteforce-luks from source , got make install done, check also good.

I mounted my NAS samba drive with cifs , works fine, all files are accessible in the share I try to mount vhdx to a directory in /mnt with guestmount, which works fine:

guestmount --add /mnt/dir/route/to/file.vhdx --inspector --ro /mnt/luks

then it proceeds to the cryptsetup password prompt all the time. It want's to mount up the encrypted partition. This is an issue, if it would be just a virtual drive like /dev/sda instead of /dev/sda1 then I could use the bruteforce-luks as instructed.

I tried to make a workaround with qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 filename.vhdx

to be able to map the vhdx file, it goes through, but the bruteforce-luks will say to the mountpoint /dev/nbd0 is not a valid LUKS volume or I don't have permission to access it, which is weird, because I'm with root priviledges.

Would you be so kind to point me into the right direction ?

Thank you for your time and effort!