File Encryption - windows XP

[peterpepo]

Hello,

i kindly ask for help in hope, that someone will be able to help me.

 

Couple years ago fiend of mine was using windows XP home. She had tons of photos on the harddrive, turned on File Encryption and was using computer normally.

Year ago she decided to backup all the photos to external hard drive, so she did, deleted her account on host machine... Everyone forgot about active encryption.

 

Today, i wanted to check the photos, but found that these are encrypted so i am unable to open nor copy them.

We plugged external hard drive back to original computer, recreated her account.. We can see thumbnails of photos but cannot open them.

File names are green in explorer. In total commander, they have -e parameters.

 

Please, please can you help me ? Those photos are very valuable, shot on already destroyed camera films, so this is only existing backup ;(

 

Thanks

[macpro622776]

This is exactly why I never use Windows encryption. AFAIK there is no solution to this unless you are able to replicate the SID of the original user.

[peterpepo]

No brutforce methods available ?
What is SID ? I remember exact name of user account, and we could figure out password theoretically.
Any chances that the keys are backed up somewhere in system (i think it hasn't been reinstalled completely, just user account deleted).

[Guest GRRigger]

Try to find the key: http://www.mediacollege.com/microsoft/windows/encrypted-files.html

If you dont find it, i am afraid the files are lost. Had the same issue with hard drive myself ;P

Copied encrypted data, and then forgot to put the key. All lost.

[macpro622776]

What is SID ?

Security ID, it is a series of letters and numbers that uniquely identifies each user account. Even if you recreate the account like it was before, the SID will still be different.