Lost key -- retrieval possible?

[David Shaw]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 09:22:26PM -0500, Nori Heikkinen wrote:

> > > :public key packet:
> > >   version 4, algo 17, created 1024861383, expires 0
> > 
> > > :public sub key packet:
> > >   version 4, algo 16, created 1024861420, expires 0
> > 
> > That's a public key.  Are you sure you got that from your secret
> > keyring?  
> 
> That's the value of '--export-secret-key nori', yes ... 
> 
> > If so, I think when you were copying data around, you might have
> > copied your public key on top of your secret key.  That is
> > consistent with the other errors you reported as well.
> 
> oh, i hoped something like that hadn't happened ... i don't understand
> how it could have, as i didn't rename files or anything!

That's very strange.  If you just copied the .gnupg directory whole,
this should not be possible.  Perhaps as the disk was failing one file
became munged into another?

> > Or perhaps when you were copying files around you copied the secret
> > keyring into a different file?
> 
> what would i be looking for?  something that said "private key
> packet"?  if so, should i just make a backup directory, go through,
> and rename everything in in secring.gpg, and then try the command,
> grepping for "private"?

You don't need to do all the renaming: just run "gpg --list-packets"
on each file in question.  Grep for "secret".

David

-- 
   David Shaw  |  dshaw@jabberwocky.com  |  WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/
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