Vista data Encryption

[VisionxOrb]

I installed Vista ultimate recently & encrypted some very important files using the built in encryption from Vista, I reformated & installed Vista Ultimate & now I cant access the files is there any way possible to retrieve them? any help would be far more then appreciated thank you sooo much.

 

[mechBgon]

Did you back up your encryption key? If not, there is no feasible way to get those files open, unless you have access to a Time Machine; that's the whole point.

 

[VisionxOrb]

well the thing is the encrypted files have always been on my D drive which I use for storage & never formated

 

[Alone]

If you formatted your OS install, then it's lost unless you backed it up. From what I hear, the key is stored somewhere in Vista itself, so using a program to find it would be, iirc, impossible at this point.

 

[mechBgon]

If you encrypt stuff in the future, make sures to back up your EFS recovery certificate. Start > Search > Secure online key backup

Sorry about your stuff 🙁

 

[VisionxOrb]

So there is no possible way to decrypt? not any way?

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: VisionxOrb
So there is no possible way to decrypt? not any way?

Nope. It's gone. 🙁

 

[Nothinman]

So there is no possible way to decrypt? not any way?

Sure, you can bruteforce the encryption key but it'll take centuries to go through all of them.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: VisionxOrb
So there is no possible way to decrypt? not any way?

wouldn't that defeat the purpose of encryption?

 

[Alone]

Originally posted by: nweaver

Originally posted by: VisionxOrb
So there is no possible way to decrypt? not any way?

wouldn't that defeat the purpose of encryption?

Indeed. His only chance was to force it out of Vista, but he formatted it.

Bye bye.

Well, at least the encryption worked, right? :laugh:

 

[Jeff7181]

No, it's not necessarily gone. PM me... not going to post it here for any douchebag to read.

 

[Alone]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
No, it's not necessarily gone. PM me... not going to post it here for any douchebag to read.

He formatted his Vista partition, so even if you have stumbled upon a tool to grab the key, well, it probably won't work.

 

[Nothinman]

He formatted his Vista partition, so even if you have stumbled upon a tool to grab the key, well, it probably won't work.

If he can recover the private key and still knows the old password then it's possible to recover the data.

 

[Jeff7181]

Actually nevermind... the method I'm thinking of defeats NTFS permissions, not encryption. 🙂