Tech help needed. Think i've fried my BIOS...

[shamrock_uk]

It's damn difficult if you've reinstalled and don't even have your old user profiles on the disk. According to my first link though, Microsoft and other companies will help you for a fee.

This site provides several methods for breaking the encryption. It's not easy though and not for the technically faint of heart.

There is a design flaw with EFS though which may be worth a try first - if the files are encrypted whilst not in an EFS encrypted folder then plain text copies are made temporarily that aren't encrypted. It's possible that data recovery software may pick these up, although the damn reinstall may have ruined that avenue for you as well.

The moral of the story is - export your keys! I'm shuddering to think how many people are going to get caught out by this in Vista when encryption is compulsory.


Edit:

This Wikipedia article also covers a couple of other security flaws with EFS which would make it fairly easy to recover them if the OS was still intact. I'm just not sure whether things like the hashes can still be recovered after a reinstall though. Might be worth trying some data recovery software for things like that too.

[ 05-11-2006, 01:10 PM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

[Sever]

Bozos, the guy who 'fixed' it is the local computer nut and he's not interested in the money. He upgraded the system from a p4 a few years ago and has helped us with several issues since. After installing the new mboard, his first action was to try and recover a usable restore point using a windows mirror program. For some reason (i still don't know and i was watching him do it) it became necessary to reinstall xp. He was unaware that i'd formatted about 8 months ago and put xp pro on the system. By the time i realised what he was doing, it was too late. He's all apolagetic and stuff, but i'm still a bit annoyed.

AFAIK, the bios chip itself is fried, which is why the automatic bios restore from the hard drive didn't work.

[Sever]

Thanks for the links Shamrock, looks like my weekend's booked with a crash course on EFS recovery.

[Hivetyrant]

The BIOS backup is there specifically for situations like that

Anyways, if you had the data encrypted using the WinXP NTFS encryption system, then yes your data is gone forever UNLESS you created a password backup disk (which nobody does)
However, if it was just a profile that no one had access to then it is *possible* but not easy, I have only done it a few times and its a pain in the ass, especially if you don't know what you are doing.

If he installed XP Home on the HDD without formatting, he would have been well aware that XP Pro was on there (it tells you during install)

Have fun with the profile stuff, unfortunantly in most cases the data is better off left to die, and the only (supposedly) easy way to get it is if you are a Linux guru but I still don't understand how they do it....

[Sever]

Originally posted by Hivetyrant: The BIOS backup is there specifically for situations like that

But it shouldn't take 15 minutes plus to transfer BIOS data from the HDD unless the chip is damaged, should it? I don't know if this is even possible, but thinking back to when i first pressed reset, i did it slowly and not to the point where the button clicked. Could the system have reset itself dozens of times in that instant and damaged the hardware in the process? I can't think of any other reason why the chip was working one minute and fried the next.

Originally posted by Hivetyrant: Anyways, if you had the data encrypted using the WinXP NTFS encryption system, then yes your data is gone forever UNLESS you created a password backup disk (which nobody does)

No password backup disk for me. Didn't even know i could make one. Looks like i'll have to get over it.

Originally posted by Hivetyrant: If he installed XP Home on the HDD without formatting, he would have been well aware that XP Pro was on there (it tells you during install)

Ya, that's why i'm annoyed. There was some minor confusion created by the label of the second HDD (called, quite erroneously, "Windows95B") but i pointed that out to him. I still don't know why it was even necessary to reinstall an OS. Other than the new motherboard driver, i thought a restore point could fix the problem. He was talking to someone on the phone when he did it, so maybe his processor wasn't up to multi-tasking.

[Hivetyrant]

Originally posted by Sever: quote: Originally posted by Hivetyrant: The BIOS backup is there specifically for situations like that

But it shouldn't take 15 minutes plus to transfer BIOS data from the HDD unless the chip is damaged, should it? I don't know if this is even possible, but thinking back to when i first pressed reset, i did it slowly and not to the point where the button clicked. Could the system have reset itself dozens of times in that instant and damaged the hardware in the process? I can't think of any other reason why the chip was working one minute and fried the next.[/QUOTE]Ok, I should have done a bit more research...
I recognised that motherboard and thought that it had Dual BIOS, but it doesn't. So if your BIOS chip did indeed fry, it is long gone.

And yes, a BIOS upgrade in a board that old will generally take a little while. And if the process is interupted, then its long gone