[Solved] Password to encryption suddenly not working anymore

[lucifers]

I'm using Linux Mint 18,3 and have several years of experience with VirtualBox.

I've got a Windows 10 image in Virtualbox which I've password-protected. This has been working for several months and I've never changed the password. I was even using it yesterday.

But today VirtualBox wouldn't accept the password to boot the "Windows 10"-system. My first attempt to solve the issue was to be sure that CAPS-LOCK wasn't active. My second attempt to solve the issue was to be sure that the password was correct (I checked that I didn't remember wrongly). My third attempt of a fix was to write the password in an text-editor and copy/paste it into VirtualBox. But this didn't fix the issue either.

Now what am I to do?

[mpack]

What is the exact error message?

[socratis]

At a first glance, this doesn't seem to be a VirtualBox problem. What's your host's keyboard layout? Do you have multiple keyboard layouts enabled? Can you boot in safe mode and change the layout from there?

[mpack]

If the OP can see what he's written in a text editor, and pasting that into VirtualBox still doesn't work, then the keyboard is not the problem.

@lucifers: are there any special characters in the password? Anything not available in ASCII text?

And I assume you are talking about the VirtualBox encryption feature right? Not some encryption feature of the guest.

[lucifers]

What is the exact error message?

The exact error-message from VirtualBox is:

"Encryption password for ID = "Windows 10" is invalid"

[lucifers]

At a first glance, this doesn't seem to be a VirtualBox problem. What's your host's keyboard layout? Do you have multiple keyboard layouts enabled? Can you boot in safe mode and change the layout from there?

My keyboard-layout is "Danish" and that's the only option in "Keyboard" in "Settings".
The checked options at "Danish" are:
* use the same layout for all windows
* use a country-flag, if available, to represent keyboard-layouts.

[lucifers]

If the OP can see what he's written in a text editor, and pasting that into VirtualBox still doesn't work, then the keyboard is not the problem.

@lucifers: are there any special characters in the password? Anything not available in ASCII text?

And I assume you are talking about the VirtualBox encryption feature right? Not some encryption feature of the guest.

I would think that the keyboard isn't the issue, either.
After this issue occurred I had sort of like the same thought in that direction. That's why I upgraded my kernel so that some translation of the input wasn't the problem somewhere down the stack of commands to the system.

My password consists of Uppercase, lowercase, numbers and an !

Yes, the encryption is the one in VirtualBox. It's the one I have to enter right after I push the "Start"-button and before anything in the OS in the VirtualBox-image has loaded.

[lucifers]

Oh, crap

Sorry guys. Thanks for your help.

I solved it. I was going too fast. The issue was that the password consists of some of the same words as my encrypted partitions. And I was using that password instead.

Now I'm using the correct password and now everything is working again.

Again: I'm sorry for my stupidity. I'll go outside and slap myself silly now

[mpack]

Thanks for owning up. I'll mark the topic as solved.

I would also suggest that, if you aren't doing it already, then backups are a good idea, even though it turned out be a false alarm this time! Bear in mind that it's in the nature of encryption that if encryption function is unhappy in any possible way, then it can only ever result in the unrecoverable loss of all your data.

[lucifers]

Well, I haven't got anything else in my Virtualbox—image than the OS. I made that decision partly because of the risk of loosing everything; not only a fully configured OS.