Acer HDD Issues

A while ago my Acer 6920g had tea spilt over it, naturally the screen and power no longer work however the HDD does. I've got several files that are on external HDD and are green (encrypted on the acer and therefore totally useless by any other PC).
I've put the HDD in another laptop and tried to boot up from there, I get the bluescreen of death and for some odd reason I can't simply have my desktop select it and boot from there through the bios, I connected it through the external HDD adapter to USB.

I have a backup of the system state made by Acronis True Image Home and I was wondering if there is anything I can do?

 

If you want to boot from it, you could try using a 3.5" internal adaptor for your hdd and use it as an internal disk and boot from there. However, when you say encrypted, was it encrypted using BitLocker or even right clicking the file and encrypting it from there? You cannot decrypt the file without the original Windows installation, which may cause driver issues with your desktop should you boot using it.

 

It is effectively the latter of the two encryptions, by which i mean the box in the 'security' tab of properties (once right-clicking the file) is ticked (and also greyed out).

In addition:
If I were to wipe the HDD and create a new partition, would that adapter allow me to fool any of my machines into thinking it was internal thereby allowing me to install windows 7 on it?
Where would I find this type of adapter to buy?

Regards
Renz

 

bump!

I can use either a desktop or an HP Compaq Presario V6000 Laptop

 

Hi,

you can't install Windows on an USB drive. Admitted there are some tricks apparently, but this is not what I would consider a real Windows installation.

In case your laptop HDD has a Sata interface, then you simply need a mechanical adapter that allows to install a 2.5" HDD in a 3.5" bay (of a desktop computer).

Apart from that, I am not sure if EFS does invalidate the encryption keys if the OS is booted in another hardware. You might check MS Knowledge base for details. At least you should have (exported) backups of these keys and certificates.

Michael

 

You will need the encryption certificates and keys by exporting them. If you do not do this, your encrypted files will be unrecoverable.

As for the adapter, you will need a 2.5" to 3.5" internal SATA HDD adapter, because Windows will run very slowly externally should you try to install it, furthermore there will be issues related to bootup.

 

Hi guys, thank you for getting back to me!

In the time between my bump and now i formatted and re-partitioned the acer HDD and then attempted to install windows xp onto it via USB. As you quite rightly said there were bootup issues, specifically the BSOD.
It looks like I won't be unencrypting any of my files so I've decided to cut my losses and move on.
Thankyou very much for trying to help all the same

Best regards
Renz