Lost my syskey disk

[Shelly]

I lost my syskey disk. What should I do?

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

Well, you might start by explained what you mean by "syskey disk."
This is not a term in common usage.

Bruce Chambers

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[Richard]

Bruce buddy

Syskey has been around since about sp1 of Windows NT4. It
is used to secure the SAM by providing a 128 bit layer of
encyption. It can be stored on a floppy, hence the "Lost
my syskey disk' question. Unfortunately if you don't have
this disk you can't boot the machine, ever.

 

[Drew Cooper [MSFT]]

Right. Can't boot into that installation of the OS. Shelly should be able
to recover all files that were on FAT32 and most files that were on NTFS
using a parallel install or a 3rd-party bootable NTFS-reading tool.
Anything that was encrypted is now lost, however.