How to Recover Encrypted Files & Folder

One of our User had Encrypted a folder in his PC (OS is Win2K). Our servers running Win NT4 crashed and we had to recreate all the User Accounts once again. Now we cannot release the encryption for that folder or the files inside that folder. We tried cipher also. However, we are getting the error message as “Access Denied” even though we have logged-into the PC as Administrator. Could someome help us salvage the data from Encrypted folder.