If you formatted your old installation's partition, then chances are the data's lost Basically, doing so would have destroyed the keys/certificates associated with your old user account that would have allowed you to read the file, so there is no longer any way to decrypt them Making a new user account in a new installation with all the same names and passwords doesn't recreate the keys needed. Doesn't matter what permissions you stick on the files or take ownership either, you still can't decrypt them.

Now from looking at one of the pages you showed me, you seem to need a key of some sort to decrypt the files, since I am missing this key, does that mean my files are lost?
Correct


Things change though if your machine was in a domain environment and not standalone though In this case, the machine would have had a recovery agent policy from the domain such that by default, the domain admin can decrypt files if the user's lost/destroyed their key, like it seems you've gone and done. The policy may also specify other domain users too with this kind of power. Standalone WinXP has no recovery agents by default, not even administrators. I think standalone Windows 2003 specifies the local admin as an agent by default though - I'll take a guess that Samuraid did his tests on a Win2k3 machine (either standalone or on a domain) and didn't do a reinstall on the OS partition between encrypting the files and trying to recover them, hence he would have had no problems decrypting local files made by other users


"Encrypted files can become decrypted if you copy or move the file to a volume that is not an NTFS volume"
Only works if you can read/decrypt the files in the first place



Well, if you've got a copy of your old installation or it's partition somewhere, you might be able to recover the keys and import them into your new user account, but I have no idea how to recover the keys in this manner :kaoplain: