recovering an Encrypted folder

I have a problem which I never knew I had until yesterday!
I have a folder containing an archive of digital photographs, roughly 4.5gbs worth of my photography. The folder is on a drive which used to be in an XP Pro machine. A while back I took it out, upgraded my machine and installed Vista. Since then I have noticed that it has encryption on that folder. This in itself is very odd as I have never used encryption on anything, I had no call to on a home computer!
A friend of mine who is a network admin for a company has used my machine on occasion and looked at permissions etc when we were troubleshooting my home network but I can't see any reason why the encryption should have been added.
Anyway to come to the problem.. I can no longer access these files. Is there a way to remove encryption from these files? The XP machine no longer exists but I could easily setup a dual boot if needs be, I can remember my old user name and password from XP but not sure that would help at all.
Any suggestions would be gratefully received.

 

What is the problem? Are the folder contents inaccessible? If they are, dual booting won't help you. Once the key is gone, nothing short of professional help can help you recover that stuff...

 

I can browse the folders.. see the file list but can't open, copy or move them

and I had a nasty feeling that would be the case.. Would Linux be able to see them or at least copy them? (it's a long shot I know but if I ask the question it might save me an hour or so of installations and harddrive moving!)

 

Nope. Once the encryption key's gone, it's really difficult to decrypt the files. It is theoretically possible, but since you have even formatted the original install of XP, nothing short of data recovery experts even have a chance of getting those back.

A different OS would be of absolutely no help.

 

oh well.. I had thought that might be the case but figured I may as well ask first!

I do have a couple of file recovery programs including decryption ones but I haven't been too successful in the past with them but I guess it's worth a try before spending money on professional help. I'll make an image of the disk tho before I try, I learnt that lesson the hard way once!

 

The software I've got already doesn't do the trick but.. I've found one that does. AEFSDR 3.2 runs on Vista and seems to have found the files and the associated keys..
It would be nice if I could somehow find the keys myself manually then decrypt the files without having to purchase the software. At least I know they are there and that the files can be decrypted (The trial version of the software has decrypted the first 512bytes into a specified location to show that it works).

Would there be a way round this? If the keys are available on the harddrive would a dual boot of XP work in this case?

 

If you encrypt the files or folders, and you told me that you reformat the OS. There is no way in the world that you can recover the excrypt file without the private key. When you reformat your OS, you alreadt deleted the private key to decrypt the files. Don't even bother look for the software to decrypt it because there is none on the market.

 

I'm sorry I probably didn't quite explain it very well as I was getting a bit stressed out by it all at that point!

I had XP installed on one HDD and my photos were stored on a second drive. I upgraded my machine and wiped XP off the first HDD and installed Vista. I then used the second drive as it was, there were no changes made to that drive.

The program I mentioned (AEFSDR) searched for keys on a specified HDD and reported that it had found the private and master key from my old installation of XP (this was based on the user name and password I had entered, which I had used on my XP installation), also it found a set of keys from when the drive was in a 2k machine and also some Vista ones. AEFSDR shows what looks to be a hex string next to the labels public key and master key. Unfortunately the program won't allow you to export the keys it just shows you that they are there.

Is there any way of using the hex string to recreate a certificate or key and using that to decrypt the files? I tried researching it last night but ended up looking at pages and pages of complex stuff which will take some understanding. It does look like it could be possible but at the moment it's beyond me without a lot of further reading.

I know I'm clutching at straws here but I don't give up easy! Also time is no issue I'd just like to get them back.

 

Your problem is the same as mine. I am also trying to recover an encrypted folder on the second drive after I did reinstallation on the main drive due to registry corrupt. Were you successful in solving this problem? I have brought my laptop to Bestbuy and they also cannot help.