Gents...a friend of mine has told me that the guys here are the best and most knowledgable blokes on the web...and I have a serious problem...

Due to some corrupted dll files, I had to reinstall my XPPro...in doing so, I didn't realize that my encryption keys would be wiped...I have one folder, that just happens to be my BUSINESS files, that was still encrypted before I reinstalled. Is there ANY way to decrypt that folder so that I can get my files back???

Encrypted in what..........NTFS Encrypted ?

Yes..I used the XPPro built-in encryptions on an NTFS file system...

Short answer they be gone, just remember to decrypt before re-installing next time........

But don't get me wrong there may be a way, to decrypt them but none that I know of and none that I can find.............

Well...thanks for looking anyway...god I hate making stupid mistakes...oh well...

Well in most cases the data isnt gone just there is no pointer to the information there is still a chance you can undelete but if you install to much all ur 1010101 will be overwritten and you have lost your data.. thats why you should always have a low lvl undeleter like norton undelete or some shit so you can get files back when you don't even realise you've screwed up

But either way the encryption keys that windows was using can not be undeleted anyway can they ??? Are they not somewhere within the security profile that windows uses, to log in certain users ?? Thus they can not be retrieved, especially after a re-install. I may be totally wrong but thats what I though......

hey guys. i kind of have the same problem. i had xppro w/ ntfs and 2 hd's (c & d). i had some encrypted files on c but then moved them to d so i could reformat c again. before i reformatted i "thought" i had backed-up my key. what i have is a file i put on a floppy and it says "certificate backup.pfx." anyways, once i reinstalled windows (xppro again w/ ntfs) on c, it wouldnt let me see the enrypted files. i put the floppy in, double clicked it, it ran me through some wizard and said "successfully imported" or whatever. well whatever that did, it didn't allow me to see my encrypted files on d. btw, it wont let me move them either. so i got to thinking....i had a norton ghost image that i had burnt on some cd's when i originally installed xppro (the same install that i encrypted the files with) but it isnt ntfs (it was a fat32 image but i later changed it to ntfs...which is obviously why im posting lol...didnt know if that would matter). anyways, i made a ghost image of my current system, loaded up the old ghost file but it STILL wouldnt let me open the files! i left the install drive (c) as fat32 but d was still ntfs. would that have mattered? i dont see why...i mean as long as i had the right "key" or whatever in the os??? maybe i could reload the old fat32 system again and convert to ntfs...i mean thats all can think of. oh..btw..when i put in the old fat32 ghost image in my current system, norton will let me browse through the folders!!! is there anything in there i could extract or use?? hey guys, i appologize for this being so long but i wanted to give as good as details as i could. thanks again for any and all help.

there is a way to get access to the encrypted files. the instructor in a MCSA/MCSA instruction class explained it. I will have to think about it to remember what it was though.