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EFS encrypted files, Old Hard Drive not bootable am i SOL?

By Demianwulf ·
My old hard drive failed on me and became unbootable. I migrated all my files onto the new hard drive with the old as a slave. I doubly encrypted some sensitive files with Microsoft EFS and Axcrypt (so I'm doubly screwed I think)...I have the passphrases for Axcrypt, but the I did not back up certificates from the old hard drive. I do have access the the drive, but it is not bootable. I have read some other threads along the same line, but most of the time the drive was written over...Is there any hope for me to recover these files?

http://ivoks.blogspot.com/2006/04/cups-and-efs.html

This guy seems to think its possible, but I'm having a hard time making sense of it all.

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Restore disk

by p.j.hutchison In reply to EFS encrypted files, Old ...

You need to restore the disk as is to another HD with the user accounts and profiles intact, you can repair it to make it bootable, then you can either login as administrator and use EFS Recovery Agent in Certificates.msc to recover the cert or login as the user and decrypt the files otherwise its very very difficult to recover them!

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How do I do a restore?

by Demianwulf In reply to Restore disk

While it might be possible to fix it to become bootable. I can't seem to get it to work. Is it possible to somehow reclaim them manually from the drive as a slave? What is the process for doing a restore to a fresh drive?

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Restore

by p.j.hutchison In reply to How do I do a restore?

You can either do a disk to disk copy of do a full backup of the drive using NTBackup with the System State (most important) and restore that to the new drive. Boot off it and login as the user and export the certificate using Certificates.msc console.

You could restore the profile in C:\Documents and settings to a new user and make sure the password is the same as before and then recover password.

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