EFS - A deadend street :( Pls help

[Badfinger]

Well I admit, this was a stupid thing to do, but it happened. I tried my best to get back on the road, but nothing worked for me so far. Here's what problem I have:

Well I installed long ago Win2k Professional and used the EFS. Everything went well, no problems and I was satisfied. But when I changed to WinXP, I forgot to decrypt the files. Now I have the problem, that I can't get back the files. I cant take them over, but still can not remove the EFS or open them, even as I'm now the owner.

I'm very sorry, if you just think, I'm a newbie. I have experience with computers and so on, but here I made a big mistake. The problem is, I need those files back, because those are manuskripts of my short stories. I have some backups, which are not encrypted, but the last works aren't in the backups

So pls, tell me what I could do, to get me out of this deadend street.

Best regards and many thanks in advance,
- badfinger

[The Grunt]

If I remember correctly, this is actually a dead end road... From what I hear there is no possible way to get your data back... There was a thread on here back 4 months or so that discussed this... IIRC the guy didn't end up finding a way.

[djscribble]

i am not sure if this will work, but please try the "recovery" section of this article:

http://www.winnetmag.com/Windows/Art...907/15907.html

let us know if it works or not....

[nihil]

As far as I know you will need a machine running WIN2K and EFS with the default (main) administrator as the EFS recovery agent.

Burn the files to CD, load them onto the Win2K box and decrypt them there.

That is a guess as I have never had to do it, but I imagine that the problem (and solution) is similar to recovering compressed backup files under different versions of DOS.

Good luck

[phishphreek]

Hmm... I wonder if that will work for him.... because it is not the same admin account, not to mention different operating system.

If that were the case, then I can encrypt a filesystem with one admin account. Then take the drive out and mount it as slave in another box. The default admin account of the second box will be able to decrypt the files?

That makes absolutely no sense... but then again... this is microsoft that we're talking about.
They have to leave a backdoor in everything or they catch **** from all the different .govs out there?

I am very curious about this... if he/she doesn't reply tonight... I'm going to have to play with this myself tomorrow.

[nihil]

Hi phish~

Good point, but I think that is a "backdoor". The Default Administrator Account is the same on all instances of Win2k.

MS has never been particularly strong if you have physical access, come to think of it, I suspect most other operating systems are the same, which is why we lock computer room doors, use removable HDDs and so on?

I am rather interested in the result one way or the other.

I made the suggestion because of my experience with DOS in the old days..........manys the time I have had to hunt down a box with a particular DOS version because the backup disk decompression tool never seemed to be backwards compatible

Earned me a lot of free beer

[Soda_Popinsky]

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...light=efs+soda

[phishphreek]

nihil: I said its not the same admin account because it is not. They should have different SIDs?
So, yes, they have the same "Administrator" name, but different SIDs?

I'm not sure how m$ comes up with their encryption scheme... but if its based on username... that just plain sucks.

soda, I didn't read your link yet. maybe some clues lay in there?

/me off to do some more reading.

Glad I didn't trust EFS alone. I use(d) it in addition to pgp... overkill? I guess not.

Ok, just got done reading the other thread... basically the user is screwed.

soda: why didn't you just say that? You made me read three pages of ("don't think so, maybe, nope you're screwed!")

[nihil]

Hi phish~, Hi soda~,

As I see it the only difference (hope ) is that the guy was using Win2k NOT XP. I am not sure if there is a difference in this area, between the two OSes?

That would be his only hope I would say. I openly admit that I do not know the inner workings of EFS, but would hope that this is an OS driven issue (for his sake). Win2k is NT5, so might be less anally retentive than XP?

just a thought

[Badfinger]

Thx all for your information, concern and ideas. As soon as I'm back at home on the machine, I will try all out, and will give feedback, as best as I can. I guess it was just a big mistake