As it turns out, to decrypt the files you need a certificate which can only be generated on the machine which encrypted the files, which is Linux live CDs with NTFS support If you’ve made the punishable-by-huge-amounts-of-pain mistake of using EFS and your disk crashed, as is my case, hope is as dimmed as the foresight of the folks who designed NTFS and used more than the actual user password to encrypt the data. you don’t use EFS for your most sensitive data, you’re pretty much off the hook. If you’re not paranoid about security (by nature or by job description), i.e. mount the images as drives under Windows and copy the files or be brave and mount the partition in a VM and try to actually boot it, at least as far as a command prompt (safe mode) or use a backup/partitioning tool to write the images to another disk.Boot off the live CD and use ddrescue to get a binary image of each partition or mount the partition(s) and copy the files to a safe place.Get a Linux live CD distribution which has good built in NTFS support (most of them have basic support by now) and ddrescue.almost dead, but not still “sort of” kicking), booting off a Linux live CD might still help recover (some of) the data. Nowadays, with very-much-improved NTFS support under Linux (and rather tolerant to faults compared to its native counterpart under Windows), it isn’t always so. Up until a while ago, particularly if the partitions were formatted with NTFS, the situation was pretty much hopeless. At some point in your IT-enthusiast life you must’ve had at least one dead HDD, off of which Windows wouldn’t boot anymore.
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