One the most frustrating thing that I just encountered happened when I connected an external hard disk that is password protected to an Ubuntu with GNOME 4. The password dialog showed up, I entered the password and the dialog started showing the loading animation but no error or acceptance of the password.
I could not cancel, close, do anything. I had to force the shutdown of the system. The dialog disables access to anything else do I cannot do absolutely anything. I don’t understand why a password dialog has to do this and I believe is an absurd behaviour
Has anybody else experienced this? How do you get out of it without having to shut off the entire grid?
Nothing, that’s the problem. I pressed ESC, ALT F4, no key does anything. Nor does the closing buttons. It’s not like it’s frozen. The dialog simply doesn’t close even if there’s feedback from the key pressing
When I had 42.5 last year (I’m on Arch Linux) I had no issues with the password prompt for LUKS2 encrypted USB disks. I have 43.3 currently and that also doesn’t have issues.
Is there anything special about the external hard disk you’re using? Is it just LUKS encrypted with a password or do you have some more complicated setup? Does the hard disk mount fine on other systems? Does the issue happen with other LUKS encrypted disks on this system? How long since it last work correctly — can you link it to some update in between?
When the dialog freezes you could try if you can still switch to a virtual console. I think Ubuntu puts these at Ctrl+Alt+F1 through F6. Log in as yourself and run journalctl -f to follow the system log, if there is anything happening and maybe some clue. Or try with journalctl -b -e to jump to the end of the system log and page up from there to see what if anything shows going wrong in the logs.
It happened only when it detected the driver as a faulty one (though it is not, I checked it). Thanks for the commands hint, though. I will see if they work when it happens again
You can also investigate the system log after rebooting and getting back to your desktop. With command journalctl -b -1 -e and page up from there looking for the USB getting attached and then down from there look for errors.
Or open the Logs app (install gnome-logs if Ubuntu doesn’t have it by default) and in the header bar first select the previous boot and then check the errors for anything related to USB around the time you attached the external hard disk.