So my computer crashed and I didnt back up or save my private keys so i took out the 2.5 ssd drive wd blue and connected it to my laptop. It came on as drive D. So i plugged in the ssd from my old desktop and found the folder to the private keys. I found out which one i needed based on the date it was created. When I open the folder it comes it a totally different way than my public key looks. ill give you and example of what it looks like. This is just the 1/3 of it but its in all caps. and the rest looks just like that too. kleopatra wont accept it and i kinda need this private key bad. the public one is obviously fine as there are many copies of the format i need it in. but cant get this one to be in the format it needs to be in. If anyone has dealt with this before can you please share your input. it will be worth it for both of us.
Did you try to copy the content of the old folder with private keys into the folder with the private keys on your new system? Then restart Kleopatra and check if it loads the old keys.
yes i did that and then it made the username bold in the certificate list so i thought the problem was fixed however when i go to decrypt it says no private keys. This is odd because everything i check says it has a private key and everything is OK. i tried deleting and reimporting on different versions. so i found the right format it needs to be in, its just not picking it up.
And that was a good suggestion because it also gave me the right format it needs to be in. So i literally have the public key and private key in the right format. I load it. It bolds the username and also gives me signing privilege and I can authenticate a message and also decrypt it to check the authenticity. Am i missing some command or another folder? Someone said the computer you made the name with is the only one that it will work on. However, i refuse to believe this as i just need to figure out why its not picking it up. Does the envelopes have anything to do with it? sorry if im going to deep and you just offered a suggestion. then its cool. ill play around with it. i may even have to give the keys to someone to see if they can import it correctly and decrypt .
This is complete nonsense.
You can copy the gnupg home folder even from a Windows to a Linux machine (and vice versa) and it will still work.
Unfortunately your description of your problem is hard to comprehend. I’m not completely sure what you did. It seems you did not copy the whole gnupg folder to your laptop? But then later you did?
For other people reading this: Kleopatra by default shows keys where the private key (or at least one of the subkeys) is available with a bold font.
And then you write that you can now “authenticate” a message (I assume you mean sign a message) and you can decrypt it again. So what is not working?
If you still have a problem with your key, please go the command line (cmd.exe) and give us the output of gpg -k YOUR-KEY-ID. You may change the User-ID shown before you post it, of course.
thats above my understanding. however when i did pull up the list of public and private keys for the username it shows that my public pgp is located on the this computer but my private key is unknown. Which is very odd because i saved the private keys to this computer from the d drive when transfered the hard drive to this computer. i think if i can somehow make kleopatra know somehow that the file is hosted on this computer, it could show up and work ? I even reinstalled kleopatra after i saved the public and private key to the new computer.