Re: EFS Problem

From: Phil Kline (grouper@kline.to)
Date: 03/01/03 

From: "Phil Kline" <grouper@kline.to>
Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2003 05:18:23 -0500

I am watching your situation. I need to learn about EFS as well. I did an
upgrade to Win XP PRO after my WIN 2000 PRO locked up. I had the disc for a
year but reasoned why install WIN 2000 over again as I had the new OS.
Probably a bad time to do a migration but I did.

The machine is free standing. I had encrypted some of my files for security
reasons. The migration went well but somehow I wound up with both OSs on
the machine.

MS helped me through some minor concerns. I asked if the WINNT directory
could be safely deleted and they said yes. After I was satisified with the
migration. I deleted it (duh). Well sure enough when I went to open some of
the encrypted files they wouldn't open.

I didn't even know what EFS was nor did I know to save a key/certificate
elsewhere, etc. So now I have 700 important files I can't access. I was
able to recover the security file of the WINNT directory by running a
recovery program but am not sure what to do next. I thought of copying the
files to a a machine on the WIN 2000 PRO network at work and then trying to
gain control over them by logging on as the Administrator profile but
believe I will probably have to import the whole security folder recovered
form the deleted WINNT directory.

Any thoughts, suggestions?

Thanks,
Phil

Peter K." <pmdatabase@yahoo.ca> wrote in message
news:chko5vs1oqkfsl5j2facv8cu5ne5dn5943@4ax.com...
> I am trying to learn EFS.
>
> I encrypt a file as a user on a workstation. Copy the file to the
> server and log in as Domain Administrator. I have full rights on the
> file, and the owners are domain\administrator and
> domain\administrators. Efsinfo \u says that domain\administrator is
> the recovery agent, but I cannot access the file -i.e., open it or
> remove the encryption.
>
> One thing that was a bit non-standard. This was not the first server
> in the domain. It has already been retired. When I opened a
> Certificates MMC there was no certificates in Personal ->
> Certificates. However, the Domain Security Policy had an account for
> Administrator in the Encrypted Data Folder which I exported, then
> imported into the Certificates MMC. I don't know if that has anything
> to do with the situation or not.
>
> Did I miss something, and where do I go from here? All ideas and
> assistance appreciated.
>
> Peter

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