Panic: I lost access to my encrypted Debian USB HDD

I installed Debian 13 on an USB portable drive because I like the portability of these devices, it’s a portable HDD.

I installed Debian 13 following the wizard setup and selected full disk encryption.

I have been working just fine for this month on a document and im panicking at the thought of having to start from scratch because I don’t have it backed up elsewhere.

What happens is, I enter the password, the password is correct, but then I see a bunch of errors that said [FAILED] in red letters. Eventually it just freezes and I had to press the reebot button.

I have tried the recovery mode thing on the GRUB menu (I selected the oldest version in there, there are a couple version to choose from), entered the password and it says this:

Code:

Please unlock disk sd5_crypt:
cryptsetup: sdb5_crypt: set up successfully
done.
Begin: Running /scripts/local-premount ... done.
PM: Image not found (code -22)
Begin: Will now check root file system ... fsck from util-linux 2.41
[sbin/fsck.ext4 (1) -- /dev/mapper/debian--vg-root] fsck.ext4 -a -C0 /dev/mapper/debian--vg-root
/dev/mapper/debian--vg-root: recovering journal
Inode (some number here) extent tree (at level 1) could be shorter. IGNORED
Inode (some number here) seems to contain garbage.

/dev/mapper/debian--vg-root: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN Fsck MANUALLY
            (i.e., without -a or -p options)
fsck exited with status code 4
done.
Failure: File system check of the root filesystem failed
The root filesystem on /dev/mapper/debian--vg-root requires a manuacl fsck



BusyBox v1.37.0 Debian (some numbers here) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.


(initramfs) _ and it lets me type here

Im on a laptop and typing this as I see it on the desktop screen btw not copy pasted.

If I just use the normal GRUB option to boot, I cannot see it because it goes too fast but like I said, tons of [FAILED] errors during boot. At the begining something about mounting exfb4 with errors or something.

I have tried booting on Tails and see if I can open it from here, it opens and I see all the files, however, none of the files work. I cannot copy them out of the drive or open them.

Is the drive dead? what the hell happened between yesterday and today?

Man this is devastating, a month of work wasted.

Im not going to be using these portable drives again, im going to make backups on all SATA HDDs I can find now. But please let me know if I can somehow recover the files. All I need is a small document file, the rest I have backed up, I just need that one file. This is mental.

The only hope I have is that I see the files and recognizes the password. However im not sure if the drive is busted and has I/O errors. Please let me know ASAP. I just need to recover a small file. Hopefully there is a way.