How can I recover an encrypted Linux partition after resizing, when the volume shows up as “Unknown”?

Question

I had followed the this how-to on reducing the size of an encrypted (LUKS) partition.

Everything went fine until the fdisk session. In the disk utility, the volume shows up as "Unknown" as opposed to "Encrypted" and cryptsetup doesn't recognize it (luksDump shows nothing.) Resizing it to use the same number of sectors as before didn't fix the problem.

I found this question: How to recover a partition accidently deleted with fdisk (Linux)? – it suggests using testdisk.

Would testdisk be likely to be able to restore my partition? If so, how do I recover a lost LUKS partition? If not, what else might work?

Answer 1

It sounds like you are experiencing data loss. The correct way to recover from data loss is to restore from your regular backup.

Answer 2

testdisk ended up working. The issue was that fdisk starts partitions at the first head and sector in a cylinder. Any tool that can start at an arbitrary offset should also work.

A messed-up partition table is not data loss.