Quote Originally Posted by garfield
Thanks Harry. I guess when I read through the FAQs, I didn't realize what they were saying when it said burn and image. Works fine. Now I have another question under the MS Windows & New to Linux area. Any words of wisdom?
Words of wisdom #1: When telling someone about another different thread that you want help with, provide a link to it, like this, or even like this: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28343 rather than expecting the other person will track it down.

Words of wisdom #2: You're screwed. And you've pretty much done it to yourself. I saw your other post, pretty much just skipped past it since I knew you didn't want a lecture, but since you now directly asked me .....

I have to think that when you choose to encrypt those directories, that you didn't expect that someone with a live Linux CD could or should be able to just boot it on your system and read all of your encrypted data. and you would have been upset if it had ever happened and your private information was stolen, perhaps even targeting that anger improperly at Linux rather than at Microsoft. So now Windows has done what Windows almost always does, and you are thinking that it would be nice if Knoppix could read the secured data? Why encrypt it at all if that were the case?

Microsoft actually gives you documented ways to save the encryption keys that would have helped you in just such an event. But, of course, it was important to have done this while Windows was still working.

The only glimmer of hope that I can offer is that Microsoft has always been amazingly lame when it comes to security. There may very well be ways to extract that key from the registery even now. I don't know that there is, and if I did I wouldn't guide an unknown stranger through doing it (after all, you would be upset if someone had stolen that computer and I helped him get into your encrypted files based on a posting here, right?). But if there is any chance of getting those files, you are more likely to track it down by searching on Google than looking here. Start with Microsoft Windows encrypted folder and go from there. In the process you'll also find how Microsoft suggests that you should have backed up the encryption key and learn a bit about how the system works. I do expect that you're not the first person with this problem and that it has been resolved before, but beyond Google I don't know where to point you for the answer.

By the way, to point out how pointless encrypting the folders was but to also give you some hope of tracking down a solution, while I've never dealt with Microsoft's encrypted directories, I was given a used laptop a few months back only to find that the OS was still there but the user account was passworded and I could not get in. I asked the guy who had given me the laptop, but he got it from his company and didn't have the password either. I wanted to keep the legal licensed copy of the OS rather than give Microsoft more undeserved money or use Linux. It took less time than you have already spent with Knoppix to pull the hash code for the user account out of the registery and have it broken so that I could log in as the user. And I assume that, had this been your computer with encrypted folders, that would have also given me access to the encrypted data. So, thanks to Microsoft's poor security, you wouldn't really have protected your data from someone who stole the computer, or even from someone who had access to it briefly a few times. But you seem to have made it very hard to get the data yourself now. It's likely that Microsoft's poor security will still allow you to get to the keys needed to decrypt the data.