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Pointy
Asked: 2017-01-15 17:21:49 +0800 CST

Mounting USB disk with LUKS encrypted partion fails with a cryptsetup "Device already exists" error

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I've got an external USB drive with an encrypted LUKS partition. I generally have no problems mounting the device; I click it from the xfce4 desktop and get a dialog where I enter the password.

When I try to mount the drive now, I type in the password and get the error:

Error unlocking /dev/sdc1: Command-line `cryptsetup luksOpen "/dev/sdc1" "luks-..."' exited with non-zero exit status 5: Device luks-... already exists

What do I need to do in order to mount the drive? Is it somehow corrupted? How can the device already exist if it's not mounted (and wasn't plugged in until a short time ago)?

16.04

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Yes, this happens when luks encrypted device was not cleanly deactivated with cryptsetup close.

    You can try to remove the mapping using

    dmsetup remove /dev/mapper/luks-... if you want to avoid rebooting.

    • 18

  2. From my side, when it happened the dmsetup remove /dev/mapper/luks- command didn't work due to the fact that the specified mapped disk is no more present under /dev/mapper ...

    So I had to manually close the old mapping with:

    cryptsetup luksClose /dev/sdxx /dev/mapper/luks-...

    (where sdx correspond to the luks partition you have identified with fdisk -l

    • 5

  3. This one worked for me (change sde1 with your disk label):

    sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sde1 lukslvm

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