Help Decrypting Files

Hey Guys,

I recently had a folder on a old windows machine that i copied over to my current machine. The files were encrypted when they were on my old machine, so my problem lies when i try to access them on my current machine i get access denied.To fix the problem i went into regedit to add the decrypt option to my menu, but the when i try t decrypt the files. still no luck. I don't want to loose these files.

Does anyone know how else i can solve this problem.


Lindows

hi,

did you used Windows EFS (Encrypting File System) on the file? if you did i think that the administrator of the old windows box would have rights to decrypt the encrypted files. just supply the credentials for the admin (if you know it) and try to decrypt it.

Isn't an encrypted file or folder is decrypted if you copy it to a volume that is NOT an NTFS File System Volume?

It really depends on which flavors of windows you're using. The following link to MS may help...
support.microsoft.com/kb/841715/en-us

Thank You!

I take it you don't still have the first machine? Cause you could just unencrypt it then. Or export the keys and decrypt it on the target machine.

I've seen programs that say they can decrypt efs files with just the username and password, so maybe the efs certificate is generated just with these two bits. I would think it would also be generated with some hardware info too though, plus some raw random data. But from what I've seen they seem to work, never used them myself.

If you use efs much, you should google up how to export certificates. If you do that, export the recovery agent's key from the computer.

Note: If you have certificate services enabled in a domain, it will get the certificate from there.