HELP WITH DECRYPTION!!

[Jake]

THIS IS DAMN URGENT :-(

machine: Win Xp Sp2

i have some important files on an external hard drive, i encrypted them on
the hard drive using my account on my laptop (admin account).

i for matted my laptop then created an account of the same name and
password, even my laptop regained the same name.

im trying to access the encrypted files on the external hard drive and i
cant :-(

obviously there is a missing step :-(

please any help its really urgent :-(

 

[coss little]

Unfortunately when you re-installed windows on your laptop even though you
tried to keep everything the same any account created on xp is given an SID
which is unique only to that particular account even though everything looks
and feels the same it isnt the most important factor in any user account is
its security identifier. As you have reinstalled and lost your old user
account you have lost your SID and unless you created an EFS (Encrypting file
system) Recovery agent before you re-installed you have lost the ability to
decrypt those files.