Re: Can I access a decrypted file if I have all the files backed u

I appreciate your taking the trouble to look up all those articles up for me,
but I have read them already, and none of them addresses recovery from a hard
drive that won't boot.

Thanks again for your efforts.

"GreenieLeBrun" wrote:



Rojo26 wrote:
My situation is a bit different than some I've seen here. I got a new
hard drive and tried for days in vain to clone the old one. I kept
getting errors. Then, I was no longer able to boot my computer with
the drive, but I had no trouble accessing it in a different computer.
I did a full backup of the drive but naturally couldn't
back up system state data. I installed Windows on the new hard drive
and ran restore to restore my backup. I can't access the one 3kb .txt
file that I had encrypted. So I tried everything I could to get the
old hard drive to boot on the other computer. I did a Windows repair
reinstall on it, which took all night. When it finally booted,
Explorer didn't run, but I accessed the file through Notepad and
attempted to decrypt it. I was logged on to my old user account, but
unfortunately, along the way, I had to recover old registry files
from when the computer was new. I used to have a password and
probably did when I encrypted the file. I know the password, so I
have no trouble logging on. But regardless of whether I had a
password at the time, the user account should have the same SID. Yet
I still can't decrypt the file.

I restored the registry files from the backup, and I think the
registry is now current, but that didn't help. Then I restored the
Windows files from the backup, and now I'm back to square 1--it won't
boot either computer. And the worst part is that I had to activate
Windows after doing the repair install before I could even log on, so
I expect to have trouble with my valid use of the product key on the
opther computer.

Is there a way to retrieve the certificate and encryption key from
the files on the hard drive, all of which I have?

Rojo26

I cann't answer your question as I do not use EFS but the following links
have help you.

The Encrypting File System
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/topics/cryptographyetc/efs.mspx

Best practices for the Encrypting File System
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223316/en-us

How to back up the recovery agent Encrypting File System (EFS) private key
in Windows Server 2003, in Windows 2000, and in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241201

How To Encrypt a Folder in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=308989

How To Remove File Encryption in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=308993

How To Encrypt a File in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=307877

HOW TO: Share Access to an Encrypted File in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=308991



.

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