After boot up:

1 -The hard disk encryption window came up, I entered the pwd, it was accepted, and I got the message that it was successful, the little clock icon timer spun - that's it. No desktop appeared.

2 - The second time I booted up, after entering the pwd, which was accepted and acknowledged as successful, the disk check program ran until it reached 98%. It stalled there.

3 - I went to the recovery window and selected a past/working version - same result as #1.

4 - I booted from a live-cd and tried to copy the home directory to an external drive. I didn't have permission.

5 - I went to root access from the recovery window, got to the home directory where access-private-files.desktop was and entered 'ecryptfs-mount-private' and the pwd. I got the message that the directory was 'not set up properly'.

This happened after I attempted to make an auto-login user ID, it wouldn't auto-login and I deleted the ID, keeping my admin ID intact.

I would like to get into the hard drive and copy the files to the external drive unencrypted.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for reading.

Bill