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Unable to access W2K Encrypted Files!

F

figgypower

Senior member
I had a few text files in a folder called "Secured" under Windows 2000 Professional, and I had the folder along with its files be encrypted with W2K Pro's built in encrpytion feature. Now to make a long story short, my W2K Pro install became corrupted and I installed Windows XP Home Edition over it. That fixed just about everything, but now I can't access that Secured folder. It says that "C:\Secured is not accessible." and "Access denied.". Under the folder attributes, the option to decrpt it (by unchecking the encrypt option) is greyed out. How do I regain access to these files?
 
Originally posted by: figgypower
I had a few text files in a folder called "Secured" under Windows 2000 Professional, and I had the folder along with its files be encrypted with W2K Pro's built in encrpytion feature. Now to make a long story short, my W2K Pro install became corrupted and I installed Windows XP Home Edition over it. That fixed just about everything, but now I can't access that Secured folder. It says that "C:\Secured is not accessible." and "Access denied.". Under the folder attributes, the option to decrpt it (by unchecking the encrypt option) is greyed out. How do I regain access to these files?
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Unless you made a backup of your efs recovery key before your w2k system went south, you don't. While the files are 'there', without the encryption key you will not be able to access them (ever).

Bill
 
Ok... I'm in a weird situation. When Win XP transferred my administrator account in W2K, it's under a hidden "Administrator". I can't seem to access this hidden account. Doing a safe mode start and trying to access the Administrator account lets me into the "Administrator.COMPUTERNAME" (that's not what my computer is called...) and not the "Administrator" account. It says something along the lines of account access denied. I can read everything that has been created by this Administrator account, but I can't change it; I can't even logon into the account. So I suppose my encrpyted files are gone, but the readme-only files are plain sight and fully accessible, I just want to change their attributes to archive. How do I get into this hidden "Administrator" account?
 
Installing a new operating system on top of an existing operating system is unadvised. Always upgrade or backup old data and do a clean install. Also, unencrypt all files. An account can never be recreated, enven if it is named the same, because the SID will never be the same.

Before trying this, make a startup disk set so you can change it back if it doesn't work!

Since Windows XP was probably installed to the /WINDOWS folder, and Windows 2000 was probably installed to the /WINNT folder, edit you can try to edit your boot.ini file to startup the old windows 2000 installation. edit the line that says something like "default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS" to read "default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT"

Then press f8 (sometimes f5) when it starts to boot and try to boot to a safe mode command prompt. If that works and you can type

cipher /d /s:<folder that you want to decrypt>

not sure if it will work, but it is the only chance that I can think of.

afterwards, you will need to edit boot.ini back to its original state to boot into windows xp.

good luck 🙂
 
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