Tony Yarusso's Blog

I discovered a few hours ago that my key passphrase wasn't working. At first I thought I had simply forgotten it, but remembered that I type it in every time I send an e-mail (Enigmail in TB), so that is highly unlikely. However, I did have a system freeze earlier, and had to do a hard shutdown (blame ATI, enough said). My current guess is that in that process my secret key became corrupted. What I would like to know is, does anybody know a way to restore my ~/.gnupg directory to its status as of yesterday? My /home directory is on an ext3 filesystem on LVM, btw, so there should be a journal that can be played with, but I'm not sure how to manually mess with that. I saw some computer forensics tools in the repos, but have no idea how to use them. I have already tried doing a fsck, both the one automatically done on the boot after failure and a second with 'sudo touch /forcefsck' and a proper reboot.

If all else fails, I did create a .asc file prior, which I believe is what I need to revoke it if necessary. I would of course like to avoid this if at all possible, as I did have a small handful of full-trust signatures from a keysigning meetup that would likely be hard to redo. I'm on a bit of a schedule too, since I found out it wasn't working when I tried to build a package - rotten luck that.