How To Decrypt A File?

How to Decrypt and Encrypted file/folder in windows XP?

• I have a folder on my external hard drive and encrypted it via properties - advanced then encrypt. this is using my account on laptop i reformatted my laptop and forgot that i encrypted the folder. now my problem is, how to decrypt the encrypted folder using a different certificate (though i still used the same username and password as before)

• Answer:

  Unless you saved the key with a recovery disk, it cannot be done. XP's encrypted file/folder system generates a random key and uses it to encrypt the data. It then encrypts the random key with the password. But without the encrypted key, the password is useless and there is no way to recovery the key.