I regularly consolidate my disk drives to higher capacities as they are available to reduce the complexity managing many controllers, so I’ll often have to wipe the drives before I sell them (trade up). Often they are sold at very little moment’s notice, sanitizing the data might take too long. I learned that if I encrypt my data drives, I don’t really have to do much other than just clearing out the partition before I sell them, and there’s little performance penalty for Bitlocker in modern hardware.<\/p>\n
Right now dislocker (Linux version of bitlocker) does not have a GUI to automatically unlock and mount the encrypted drives. Here’s the script that has the form “BL_{drive name}.sh” that will unencrypt the device and mount it and at the same time creating the script in the same folder to unwind (unmount & lock) the drive.<\/p>\n
#!\/bin\/bash\n\n# Extracting partition name from file name (BL_*.sh)\nFN_base=\"$(basename -- $0)\"\nFN_bare=\"${FN_base%.*}\"\npartition=${FN_bare\/BL_\/}\n\n# TODO: Check with \/dev to make sure it's legit\necho $partition\ndev_partition=\"\/dev\/$partition\"\n\n# Unlock the device into a raw image 'file'\npath_raw=\"\/media\/dislocker\/raw_$partition\"\nsudo mkdir -p $path_raw\n\nfile_raw=\"$path_raw\/dislocker-file\"\nsudo dislocker $dev_partition -u -- $path_raw\n\n# Mount the image file as a disk\npath_mount=\"\/media\/dislocker\/mount_$partition\"\nsudo mkdir -p $path_mount\n\nsudo mount -o loop $file_raw $path_mount\n\n# Build wind down file\nscript_unwind=\"unwind_$partition.sh\"\n# Leave \/media\/dislocker there for isolation\necho \"#!\/bin\/bash\" > $script_unwind\necho \"sudo umount $path_mount\">> $script_unwind\necho \"sudo rmdir $path_mount\" >> $script_unwind\n# Note that the website is wrong. umount the path, not the dislocker-file\necho \"sudo umount $path_raw\" >> $script_unwind\necho \"sudo rmdir $path_raw\" >> $script_unwind\n# Make sure the \"$0\" is literal including the $ sign or it will\n# delete this file instead of the unwind_sd*.sh file\necho \"sudo rm -- \\\"\\$0\\\"\" >> $script_unwind\nchmod +x $script_unwind\n\n\n<\/pre>\nThere are reports that newer zuluCrypt can now do bitlocker volumes. Will get back to that later.<\/del><\/p>\n\n\nI tried to get zuluCrypt on Linux Mint and ran into a few quirks<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n- They claim zuluCrypt after 5.7.1 and above supports Bitlocker<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Linux Mint 20.1 (Ulyssa)’s package repositories are conservative. It only supports up to zuluCrypt 5.7 when 6.0 is out<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Zulucrypt’s website says you still need dislocker backend for zuluCrypt use Bitlocker<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Nonetheless after these requirements are done, I cannot unlock a Bitlocker drive. The error message says it’s ‘missing a parameter’. What parameter?<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- I figured that the Bitlocker malfunction might be solved with 6.0 so I tried to download the .deb files from zulucrypt’s website for 6.0. It’s missing a bunch of dependencies that are NOT SATISFIABLE, including a libqt5 dependency that’s nowhere to be found. I found the .deb file yet there’s a chain of dependencies that also cannot be found<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- I tried to get the cryptsetup (LUKS) referred by Zulycrypt’s website but it has its down dependencies problem<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- So to install zulycrypt 6.0, I have no easy option other than moving to Ubuntu.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- I chose Mint because Ubuntu’s UI defaults are annoying to Windows users from my previous experiences, the glitches and a lot of missing options in their default GUI programs frustrates me.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- So I wondered if I can install Cinnamon (Mint’s core interface) on Ubuntu so I can get the latest and the greatest packages without waiting for the authority of Linux Mint to implement them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Turns out there’s already a linux distro that’s uses Cinnamon on Ubuntu by default! It’s called “Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix<\/a>“! Even better, after I’ve installed it, I realized I don’t have to muck with dislocker\/zulucrypt\/cryptsetup\/LUKS at all! Bitlocker just work right out of the box! When you click on the Bitlocker encrypted volume, it will prompt you for the password and that’s it!<\/p>\n\n\n\nFULL DISK ENCRYPTION IS BUILT IN Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 20.04!<\/p>\n
<\/div>