For all you folks that think NTFS Security is the greatest thing since peanut butter, I have a little story for you. I had a client who was fooling around with the encryption settings and accidently encrypted her whole drive. Obviously when she rebooted, the system couldn't read the files and the OS wouldn't load. I dropped the drive in another computer running Win2k and it wouldn't let me read the drive either. I loaded NTFS for Win98 (from Sysinternals) on to a Win98 machine. Since Win98 has no means of reading the encryption, it just ignored it and I was able to read and copy all the data to the Win98 drive. Great security Microsoft!!!

Don't blame the OS for you being stupid. MAC, Linux, Windows, DOS, if you don't know what you are doing, DON'T DO IT on a machine you can't wipe and start again.

What are you talking about? I found a way to bypass the NTFS security so I could retrieve the clients files. I think I know exactly what I'm doing.

Dave, that 'your mother' guy is drugs. Ignore him he is an idiot. Are you sure it was encryption and not just file permissions? I would not have thought that the encryption can be bypassed like that. So if I send you an encrypted file are you saying you think you could copy it to that drive and read it? That is strange. I'd like to look into that a bit more.

That's a good point Glen. Unfortunatly the client is playing innocent and has "no idea" how this could have happened. So to be honest with you I'm making a best guess as to what happened by how the drive was behaving. Here are the symptoms - It wouldn't boot, it gave the standard system file corruption message. ERD commander could not open the drive. The recovery console could not open the drive. Putting the drive in a working Win2k system as a slave could not open the drive.

This is from XP on EFS I wonder if she didn't just change file permissions on the drive. The last statement "Administrators can recover data that was encrypted by another user." might not be the same for W2K. Files marked with the System attribute cannot be encrypted, nor can files in the systemroot directory structure. EFS provides the following features: Users can encrypt their files when storing them on disk. Encryption is as easy as selecting a check box in the file's Properties dialog box. Accessing encrypted files is fast and easy. Users see their data in plain text when accessing the data from disk. Encryption of data is accomplished automatically, and is completely transparent to the user. Users can actively decrypt a file by clearing the Encryption check box on the file's Properties dialog box. Administrators can recover data that was encrypted by another user. This ensures that data is accessible if the user that encrypted the data is no longer available or has lost their private key.