Windows / Linux encoding issues

[Patrick Brunschwig]

Sacha wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've created my key pair using WinPT under Windows 2000. I used special
> characters (like é, è, ç, à, etcetera) in my passphrase.
> 
> Since a hard drive crash, I've installed Gentoo Linux on the computer
> and I can not found my Windows 2000 installation CD. I've successfully
> imported my private key in GnuPG from a backup, but when  I type my
> passphrase, GnuPG says that it's a bad passphrase.
> 
> My idea is that there is a charset encoding issue, because under Linux I
> have UTF-8 in my X server and ISO-859-1 in the console. And what under
> Windows 2000 used is, I really don't know (Windows-1252 ? perhaps...).
> 
> Can you suggest me something to found the right passphrase ?

Indeed it's very likely a charset problem. Try to convert your
passphrase to Windows-1250 or CP850, using e.g. iconv

-Patrick