My old hard drive crashed. Got a new one. Transferred everything from the old one to a partition on the new one. Everything transferred except for about 100 files. These files became automatically encrypted somehow and now I can't transfer them to the new hard drive. The only common attribute of the files is that they originated on my desktop. I am the only user, the administrator and have ensured that I have ownership of all the files. Somehow, I still don't have permission to decrypt them. Therefore, I can't transfer them. Please help!

Ben, AFAIK, unless you had a backup you could restore from, you're hosed. And the reason why is that EFS (Encrypted File System) uses symmetric and asymmetric keys based off of the USER in order to encrypt the files that were encrypted. If the user account that originally encrypted the docs is gone, then you'd need a really good cracker or you just have to give up on recovering the files. Even if you simply recreated a user with the same name and password, the SID (which is the security identifier for the account) would be different and that is the value Windows pretty much uses for everything. You can read up on EFS here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc700811.aspx#XSLTsection125121120120

Ben, AFAIK, unless you had a backup you could restore from, you're hosed. And the reason why is that EFS (Encrypted File System) uses symmetric and asymmetric keys based off of the USER in order to encrypt the files that were encrypted. If the user account that originally encrypted the docs is gone, then you'd need a really good cracker or you just have to give up on recovering the files. Even if you simply recreated a user with the same name and password, the SID (which is the security identifier for the account) would be different and that is the value Windows pretty much uses for everything. You can read up on EFS here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc700811.aspx#XSLTsection125121120120 I'm not ready to give up yet, but I mostly understand what you're saying. I don't have a backup, unfortunately. What do you mean by "a really good cracker?" I'm willing to try anything. These are important files.-Ben Davis