- It's good you've made a backup of the encrypted /data partition.
- Whatever you do, you will have to rewrite the /data partition in some
way to do this, regardless of whether it's in-place rewriting or not.
- You have installed a version of android that does not expect
encryption to be turned on.
- You are not writing to the recovery partition afaik.
- If you wanted to, you could backup the stock unencypted /data
partition also using adb
- To be safe, you could check using fdisk or file what type of
filesystem this is
- You could decrypt your filesystem.
- You could then check whether the stock unencrypted filesystem and your
now-unencrypted filesystem type matches.
- You could then attempt to restore your unencrypted filesystem
- If it messes up, you may be able to restore from the recovery using
the backup of the stock /data partition
- If it has messed up, or the filesystem isn't supported (differs?), you
could then try mounting both filesystems, stock and unencrypted on a pc,
and merging some of the files.
- You could then rinse and repeat using the modified/merged stock until
it works.
This all assumes you do in-fact have a copy of the encrypted filesystem,
ie. you took the backup before you flashed, or didn't overwrite the data
partition when you flashed, and did in-fact get a good backup.
Bare in mind it all contains risk, not sure how big ... nothing in life
is risk free & you know fosho I'm not liable :)
Josh
On 05/03/19 20:50, A. F. Cano wrote:
While strictly not a Replicant issue, I can't think of a more
knowledgeable group of people than this list for this issue.
Actually, has anyone installed the latest Replicant on a Samsung
Galaxy S T-959 (Vibrant)? There! Now it's a little more
Replicant-related.
Background:
Years ago I installed Cyanogenmod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) on a Samsung
Galaxy S T-959 Vibrant.
Then I tried to make it more secure based on the instructions here:
https://blog.torproject.org/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy
The command to encrypt the whole disk in place is:
vdc cryptfs enablecrypto inplace NewMoreSecurePassword
The current issue:
I have recently encountered compatibility problems between DavDroid (1.9-ose)
and the radicale server. The problem is apparently due to some incompatibility
of old event format ("can't compare offset-naive and offset-aware datetimes")
so I start investigating and there is a newer version of DAVDroid, now called
DAVx, but it fails to install. It requires Android 4.4. So I go looking and
find that the latest Cyanogenmod for this device is 11 (Android 4.4.4).
Bingo! I thought. Then I try to do a backup from recovery mode
(CWM-based-recovery v6.0.3.7) and encounter "Can't mount /data!". Further
research shows that this is due to the whole disk encryption I find:
https://jomo.tv/android/remove-android-device-encryption
but it's quite involved. At the end it says:
Technically, there would be a more efficient way to achieve this
(i.e. without storing and restoring the partition) by doing the
reverse of Android’s inplace encryption: It would read each sector
of the block device, decrypt it, and write it back, but cryptfs
doesn’t implement it.
I was hoping for just such a command.
That page uses TWRP, which is not available for the Galaxy S (the oldest
supported model is the Galaxy S2), so I can't use it as is.
I have extracted the /data directory/fs (in /dev/block/dm-2 per df)
$ adb pull /dev/block/dm-2 userdata.img
After extraction, file says:
$ file userdata.img
userdata.img: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data,
UUID=57f8f4bc-abf4-655f-bf67-946fc0f9f25b (needs journal recovery) (extents)
(large files)
So it looks like I managed to extract the unencrypted partition. I did this
with the phone running (not in recovery mode) so that might be the reason for
needing journal recovery: the FS was mounted and was probably modified during
the operation.
So far everything I've done has been safe. Since this is my primary phone I
can't risk screwing it up or worse: brick it. Has anyone done a complete
backup from recovery (with ClockWorkMod)? Is it a complete backup? Would the
restore clobber parts of the upgraded OS and cause problems? But I'm getting
ahead of myself.
As far as the un-encryption goes. The above page's approach is to back up the
/data partition and from recovery re-flash it. Can this be done from
ClockWorkMod?
These are the steps for using TWRP, after the original partition has been
saved:
select Wipe → Format Data
This step is required because it lets the OS know the data partition
is no longer encrypted
Reboot to bootloader: adb reboot bootloader
Write the image back to /data: fastboot flash userdata userdata.img
Reboot: fastboot reboot
Has anyone attempted this with ClockWorkMod?
Is there an alternative safe way to undo the whole-disk encryption?
I eagerly await any replies or hints. I would like to backup the state of my
phone before the upgrade, which means first undoing the encryption, then doing
a complete backup, then doing the upgrade and then a complete restore.
Projects always get bigger than originally thought.
Finally, has anyone installed the latest Replicant on a Galaxy S T-959? I'd
much rather go that route if possible, but at least it seems that Cyanogenmod
11 supports this old phone.
Thanks for any info!
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