Hello All,

I am new to the list, and a rookie MCSE. This is my first real post to the 
list. I am using Win2K Pro as administrator. Here's the problem:

Last night I had powered down my PC when I accidentally bumped the keyboard, 
firing it back up. I didn't want to wait for the logon screen to power back 
down, so I pressed the power button. Nothing. So I powered off on the back of 
the box.

Today, when I powered up, the OS no longer had the modem installed. I got a 
"detect new pci communications device" screen. Ok fine. I'll just reinstall 
the drivers. But that wouldn't work. The OS couldn't find the drivers even 
though I was pointing it right at the correct ones. So I decided to use this 
as a learning experience. I decided to try a repair from CD with an emergency 
repair disk. Ironically, I had just created the ERD anew two days ago.

So I did the repair from CD with the ERD. All seemed to go well.

Well. I have six logical drives on my hard drive. C through I. E is the 
cdrom. C is FAT. F, G, & H are NTFS. D and I are FAT32.

On G I had one folder named DATA encrypted with EFS. I cannot remember if I 
chose the "encrypt all subfolders and files" option or not. I don't think I 
did. I think I just encrypted the parent folder.

At the time I encrypted, but before I encrypted, I created a certificates MMC 
and named it EFS.msc. This contained the two certificates, File Recovery and 
EFS, in the personal store. I exported them both to a floppy. Then I saved 
this EFS MMC to that DATA folder. Then I encrypted the DATA folder.

I have been accessing the DATA folder's files just fine for two months. After 
this repair from CD with ERD today however, I cannot access any of the files 
in the DATA folder. So, I decided to try and learn something else, data 
recovery.

So the next thing I did was read the Help on how to decrypt folder/files if 
one is a data recovery agent. I followed the procedure to the letter I think. 
Remember I am the administrator with the two original keys safely tucked away 
on the floppy.

First, I imported the two original certificates mentioned above, File 
Recovery and EFS, from the floppy to a new MMC, which I saved on my desktop, 
again as EFS.msc

I backed up the DATA folder and all contents to the C drive (FAT). Then I did 
it again to the H drive (NTFS).

Then, I did a restore of the C drive backup to the C drive, and a restore of 
the H drive backup to the H drive.

The reason I did two complete backups and restores is I thought maybe it made 
a difference between FAT and NTFS.

Anyway. The restore to the C drive was not complete. It only restored 5MB out 
of 13MB. All the folders, subfolders, and file names were there. But when I 
opened a Word 2000 file for example, it was blank. The filename was there, 
but it had 0 bytes in it.

The restore to the H drive restored completely. All megabytes accounted for. 
But guess what? I still cannot access the files. Access denied.

What is the problem, folks? How do recover this data in the DATA folder that 
I encrypted with EFS. I have the original certificates on floppy. What am I 
doing wrong?

Could someone please step me through this carefully, as if I am an idiot, 
which apparently I am. I really need to get at the DATA folder and all its 
subfolders and files.

Thanks in advance. And if you wouldn't mind doing a cc to me here at 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] in addition to the list, I would appreciate it.

Greg

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