recovering documents from old hardrive please help

[Guest]

I recently installed a new hard drive as the primary master for my pc, with a
fresh copy of windows, because the old hard drive had a copy of winxp 64 on
it that failed halfway through install and never could be recovered. There
are still documents on the old hard drive from before i tried to upgrade to
winxp 64, so i plugged in the old hard drive as the primary slave, and it
appears as drive D. I can access all the files on it except for a folder that
i had set as encrypted and hidden, along with all the files in it. It shows
up with the file names, but none of them can be opened or copied to my
primary hard drive because they are protected... is there any way to recover
them?

 

[Bob I]

If you encrypted the files using EFS and didn't export the certificate,
you have no recourse but to try booting from the drive with the original
account/profile.

 

[Rock]

I recently installed a new hard drive as the primary master for my pc, with
a
fresh copy of windows, because the old hard drive had a copy of winxp 64
on
it that failed halfway through install and never could be recovered. There
are still documents on the old hard drive from before i tried to upgrade
to
winxp 64, so i plugged in the old hard drive as the primary slave, and it
appears as drive D. I can access all the files on it except for a folder
that
i had set as encrypted and hidden, along with all the files in it. It
shows
up with the file names, but none of them can be opened or copied to my
primary hard drive because they are protected... is there any way to
recover
them?

If they are encrypted with EFS, then no, unless you saved a copy of the
encryption certificate and/or designated a recovery agent. Reinstalling
created an account with a different SID, even if the account name is the
same. The files were encrypted using the SID for the original account.
That is one reason why EFS is sometimes referred to euphemistically as a
delayed recycle bin. You need to know exactly what you are doing with it.

There is no way that I know of it recover those files, however there is this
one article you can look at. Whether it will help you I don't know.

http://www.beginningtoseethelight.org/efsrecovery/

Here are some articles in the MS knowledge base about EFS and how best to
manage its use.

Best practices for the Encrypting File System
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=223316

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/?id=241201

How to add an EFS recovery agent in Windows XP Professional
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=887414

 

[Guest]

the drive should still have the certificate on it some where then? it still
has the original install on it, is this certificate a file? if so where could
i find it on the drive?

 

[Rock]

the drive should still have the certificate on it some where then? it
still
has the original install on it, is this certificate a file? if so where
could
i find it on the drive?

No it can't be exported properly except by logging in under the user account
and SID that created it.