mount

Transferring files from the host to the guest OS and vice-versa doesn't work out-of-the-box when you install VirtualBox from the Ubuntu repositories and download an Ubuntu VirtualBox image (e.g. from http://www.osboxes.org/virtualbox-images). After installing the guest additions, drag-and-drop didn't seem to work for me and I needed to set up a "Shared Folder". After setting it up via the GUI, it doesn't automatically appear on the guest desktop. You need to mount it:



Once you have decided to encrypt your hard drive, you might find yourself in the situation where you need to pull off data from it when the regular decryption mechanisms you use are not in place. E.g. when the OS is not booting or the drive has some physical problems. In that case you need to boot from a CD/DVD that supports the encryption technology that you used. In my case I need a live Ubuntu CD/DVD, preferably the same version that was used to encrypt the disk! Otherwise there might be incompatibilities:
sudo apt-get install lvm2 cryptsetup


I switched already quite a while ago from the old cryptoloop technology to the newer cryptsetup technology. However, I still forget how to manually create and mount encrypted volumes, because I do this rarely. Here are the commands:
cryptsetup create cryptovolume /dev/mapper/logical_volume
mount /dev/mapper/cryptovolume /mountpoint
In this case I mapped a logical volume, but of course you can map physical volumes, too:
cryptsetup create cryptovolume /dev/sdb1
mount /dev/mapper/cryptovolume /mountpoint