Having suffered a terminal motherboard failure I have ditched my old XP Pro PC for a new one running Windows 7. The hard drive survived intact and I have incorporated it into the new machine so no major data loss. However, I have one directory which is encrypted - seemed like a good idea at the time :dubious:. Is there any way to retrieve this data? I do have an ancient laptop running XP Pro which could be co-opted into service if that helps, though I doubt it.
Do you know how these were encrypted? If you used EFS (the built in file & folder encryption) then I think you’re screwed.
You need to be able to boot the machine as the administrator (of the old operating system) and you can do EFS key recovery, copy out the certificates used as the EFS keys or simply decrypt the files. But, you **have **to be booting the old operating system. If you can’t do this then the files are gone. EFS uses good encryption so you’re not going to find a cracking tool online.
Can you confirm whether you had software installed to do this or you just used the right click -> Encrypt file or folder option.
Can you boot into the XP installation on the old drive and login to your original account?
Yes, I just used the Encrypt folder option 
All the hardware except the drive itself is different. Maybe I could boot in to Safe Mode. Lukily none of the affected files are actually vital - may give this a try when I have some time.
Yeah, that might work. Lots of things may not be properly detected, but you should least be able to get basic video and input… that’s all you need to decrypt the files.
If you have any Windows XP professional install discs, they have a recovery console feature that would let you login to the XP system on the drive. It should let you get into the system without worrying about hardware changes preventing you from booting. It’s a command prompt interface (no gui) but there’s probably a command to decrypt the folder once you’re in.
Hmm actually after checking microsoft support you might not have access to every folder from there. I seem to remember using it and having access to the whole system. Maybe try it anyway and see if you can at least copy files from the encrypted folder to a different one.
The critical element is the SAM (Security Access Database) and registry from the original machine - by copying this off the old machine on to the new setup, you may be able to use something like EFS Key (which looks really expensive) to recover the keys to give access to the data.
You may (at some considerable level of risk) be able to replace the SAM/Registry on a copy of XP with the old one - this will allow you to log on as your original self and decrypt/export the files - but I would want to experiment with this on a virtual machine setup before playing with this too much. You could replace the SAM on Windows 2000, but XP may use a stronger security model.
ETA: if all the original XP system is available on the hard drive, you could try a Physical-to-Virtual conversion to VMWare/VirtualBox (both of which are free), then boot up your original XP install and decrypt the files. With a bit of hacking that should work pretty easily.
Si