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I have an encrypted directory using Windows XP Encryption. I didn't backup the certificate and I formatted my HDD to reloaded the OS as it was corrupt. I am now not able to access the encrypted directory, and I can only view it and not use it.

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  • Unfortunately, unless you have the certificate somewhere, there's little you can do. There's a big club of people suffering from the same problem. One plausible solution is to use Elcomsoft's Advanced EFS Data Recovery which scans the sectors of your hard drive looking for encrypted files and certificates, it might work.
    – Adi
    May 23, 2013 at 18:48
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    Nope. You can't do it. If you could, then it'd defeat the whole purpose of encrypting it in the first place.
    – tylerl
    May 23, 2013 at 22:59

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The answer is, you can't. If you were able to restore access to your encrypted folder without the required certificate, then that would prove any such encryption scheme worthless, wouldn't it? If you do however find somewhere in your backups by chance the Encrypting File System (EFS) certificate, you could follow this procedure to restore access to it and/or remove encryption. Without the EFS certificate however, your folder and its contents are otherwise nothing else than a non-decryptable file, wasting your disk's space and you can as well delete it.

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  • That's not necessarily true. The user has a key to open to file and so does either the administrator of the machine or a system user. I forget which. I will look it up.
    – Simkill
    May 24, 2013 at 13:01
  • "In Windows 2000, the local administrator is the default DRA (Data recovery agent). In Windows XP Professional, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 R2, there is no default DRA. Instead, the administrator must generate a recovery agent certificate which grants the user permission to access the encrypted resources. If the recovery agent certificate is created after the encryption of the resource, however, the resource cannot be decrypted by the DRA." I guess they changed it since I last paid any attention to EFS!
    – Simkill
    May 24, 2013 at 13:13
  • There's a minute possibility you can recover the certificate after a format though but you'd have to be very lucky to have not overwritten the blocks it was stored on.
    – Simkill
    May 24, 2013 at 13:15

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