Urgent Assistance- RESTORING boot info & KEY data.

Good morning,

well, its everyone’s worst nightmare- getting locked out, in some way or another, from their own security mechanisms.

To be honest, this issue has been unresolved for a year now. The solutions posted on the forum didn’t seem to cure my grief, in fact, i initially visited the forums for a minor problem with CDE, and to my horror and discontent, the situation escalated into a nightmare after following the advice from a member who seemingly understood what the problem was. Although i blame nobody but myself for the mess i find myself in, and continue to thank them for their help regardless of the outcome, at this point i must offer some sort of financial incentive to the person/s that are willing to take the time out to help me access to my drive. It just needs to be done asap! Frustrated would be an understatement im sure you can imagine.

To my understanding,

i encrypted my secondary internal hard drive and specified both boot-time and flash-key protection. The system drive was not encrypted in any way. A few short days after, the drive didn’t want to mount and reported “problem with the encryption subsystem.” I followed directions from a guy on these forums, who instructed me at first to modify the boot.ini, and then the second time advised to format and reinstall. later i realized there was no simple restore method available to correct this nor was there an emergency restore function within CDE. The boot-time password/flash-key check is still required in order to gain access to the drive, and thankfully i at least still have the details of the encryption settings.

Would it suffice, as a troubleshooting method, to perhaps encrypt another spare unused drive, with the same settings in a hope to restore the boot-time information required as One of Two authentication requirements for the other drive as well? I guess what im asking is, does anybody know whether the boot time settings are hardware specific or if CDE requires exactly the same OS, configuration etc as when the inaccessible drive was first created?? or would i be risking further disaster by doing this??

are there any ways to gain access to my drive at all now that im in this mess?? perhaps with any bruteforcing techniques or 3rd party apps???

I’d really like to be informed of any solid, or even “possible ball park” methods to try and recover my data.

I can provide more information if requested.

thankyou for your time.