EFS

[Guest]

Hi All,

I am sure you all get this question a million times a year but I thought I
would ask anyway.

I just reinstalled my OS (xp) and totally spaced that my USB drive is EFS
protected. I completely whiped my drive before installing XP. Of course I
have the old username and password.

What are the chances that I can retrieve the data somehow with my old
username and password? I don't have a backup of the system and all of my
important files are on this 300gb USB drive, including tons of work. Is it
possible to recover these files?

Thanks,

 

[Guest]

Nevermind. After reading a bunch of related topics, I can see that I have
pretty much screwed the pooch.

 

[Steven L Umbach]

This is a longshot by try using a data recovery program to see if it can
find your EFS private key files that are stored in your user profile under
documents and settings\username\application data\microsoft\crypto\rsa\. from
the old installation. If you can find and recover them then download the
trail version of EFS recovery from Elcomsoft to see if it can find your
private key and allow you access by entering the right password for it. The
links below are for EFS Recovery form Elcomsoft and links to Data Recovery
tools of which many speak well of File Scavenger.

Steve

http://www.elcomsoft.com/aefsdr.html
http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/system/fwdatarecovery.html
http://www.snapfiles.com/Shareware/system/swdatarecovery.html

 

[Guest]

I thank you for the response and I feel bad for anyone else reading this
post. I lost quite a bit of data because of this. Fortunately, Vista
includes a notification to remind users to backup their private keys. I can
only imagine the pain this has caused others.

I tried all of the procedures and tried undeleting the profiles several
times...

The ironic and very painful part of this is that while restoring a backup
..bkf file over the network, the restore failed because of inconsistencies.
When I tried to restart the restore process, the 25gb backup file was no
longer there. Gone, vanished, into thin air, and I nearly cried. 3 years of
work into the ether.

Someone hold me...

T

 

[Steven L Umbach]

I agree that Microsoft did a poor job informing users of the risks of EFS by
not prompting to backup the EFS keys like Vista does. That should have been
implemented in XP Pro also. I am really sorry to hear about your loss of
data. I hope you make some kind of break through with recovering your EFS
private keys or backups. I will keep my fingers crossed for you.

Steve