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I spilled coffee over my Dell and it would never work properly again.

Bought a replacement and put the old HDD in an external USB drive caddy. Most of the files some of the files are accessible but others (Word and Excel) are padlocked even though they were not encrypted before.

Is there any way, in this configuration, that I can type in my old machine's password to regain access to these locked files? I have tried to gain permission (Properties/Advanced/Permissions) which failed but the tutorial was unclear.

Any help much appreciated.

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    Have you confirmed if they are actually encrypted? If they are, and you don’t have the certificate, you cannot decrypt them.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Apr 18, 2019 at 1:55
  • Possible duplicate of superuser.com/questions/24106/…
    – Ramhound
    Commented Apr 18, 2019 at 2:52

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The files are not encrypted. Files encrypted with EFS show up with green text, which I would expect you to have noticed. You said you have a padlock on the file, which is the smoking gun. Long story short, this is due broken permission and sharing, as your current computer doesnt have the correct access to the files. This link shows an easy tutorial on how to resolve the problem.

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  • You're encouraging people to download and run a random batch file as administrator? Can you offer technical details in your answer instead? (i.e: delete these registry keys and restart explorer)... though I'm dubious that's that is involved.
    – Attie
    Commented Apr 18, 2019 at 14:04

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