access to personal files and cryptography: HELP! 1

[VanReese]

A strange thing happened to my notebook recently. I use a double partition for my documents and recently I even applied to all of them Word's normal cryptography. Due to some problems I had to reinstal XP Professional. I did, without touching my precious data in the disk's partition. When I tried to open again my files two things happened. First, he didn't recognize me as the creator owner (different ID, I guess), also, after logging in as Administrator and altering the creator owner identity to my present account, he didn't allow me to decrypt my files. (Error n° 5, says). So, now I can open my files, but cannot decrypt them.....Maybe I did something wrong when logged in as administrator....Don't know. Can you help me, please?

 

[linney]

The mistake you may have made probably occurred the day you Encrypted your files if you didn't back up the various certificates that allow for recovery.

When a Administrator changes a users password or when you re-install Windows the encrypted files are not available because of the changes that have been made to the user who originally encrypted them.

I don't know of any way to reverse what has occurred unless you have a drive image backup that you could restore from?

You can read this thread and try the recovery suggestion but if you have gone into SP2 it may??? no longer work.

How to De-crypt Encrypted files on a Stand Alone machine
thread779-390584

 

[SimonDavies]

I would have a look at some Document password crackers if I were you. Basically as Linney has said you have lost your encryption certificates and without them you're stuffed.
What used to happen on W2K was that an Admin could take ownership of the docs and decrypt them but in XP it was decided that this was a major security flaw and took it out.

One word of warning, decrypting the word documents may well take a very long time, make sure you have a very powerful machine doing the crunching.

Good luck