No longer able to mount ext4 hidden volumes, even newly created ones. Possibly due to /home being on a separate partition

[Victor239]

Expected behavior

Able to mount containers without issue.

Observed behavior

Trying to mount containers results in the error: mount: /media/veracrypt1: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/veracrypt1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.

When going through the wizard to create a new container with hidden volume inside, it opens the outer and hidden volume fine during the wizard, but when it's then unmounted and attempted to be remounted it shows the mount error again.

Steps to reproduce

1. Go through wizard to make a new container with embedded hidden volume (FAT outer volume, ext4 hidden, AES, SHA-512)
2. Unmount after wizard is finished
3. Try to mount again

Screenshots

Your Environment

VeraCrypt version: 1.24-Update7

Operating system and version: Kubuntu 20.10

System type: 64-bit

[Victor239]

Upon further testing ext4 and ext3 hidden volumes are unmountable, however exFAT ones are mountable. Unfortunately those are insufficient for my purposes as they lack POSIX permissions, as well as other limitations.

[alt3r-3go]

I've just tried to reproduce this on a fresh Kubuntu 20.10 VM - works fine for me. I've used the FAT/ext4 combination as described and tried both "will use on other platforms" and "will mount only on Linux" options in the Wizard (to cover all paths as you didn't mention which one you used). It's able to mount both inner and outer volumes fine, both during the creation and afterwards.

I've installed VC using the Ubuntu 20.10-specific dpkg from the downloads (link). How did you install yours?

Does it still reproduce for you?

[Victor239]

@alt3r-3go it still does reproduce but I've discovered a bit more about the conditions under which it does.

A live USB with Kubuntu does allow creating and mounting FAT/ext4 combination hidden volumes. My main PC doesn't mount this still however, so I think the difference is because my /home is on a separate partition than the root directory. My previous Kubuntu install had /home on the same partition, and when it was like this I was able to mount these volumes perfectly well.

I've also discovered that an existing exFAT container with FAT hidden volume can be mounted, so it's just the FAT outer volume with ext4 hidden volume combo that doesn't mount.