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Retrieving a digital certificate from a corrupt hard drive?

Hi I was wondering if it is possible to retrieve a digital certificate from a corrupt hard drive?
The hard drive is unbootable but I can access it by hooking it up to my computer and booting from my hard drive and then using a recovery program to retrieve some data. I have contacted customer support about retrieving their certificate and they say it has to be backed up using Internet Options - Content - Certificates, but obviously I cant access this from the corrupted hard drive as it is unbootable. Any suggestions will be most appreciated. Thanks

war1

Hi keepa,

Can customer support send you another certificate? Without Explorer, not sure if you can recover the old one.

Cheers!

keepa

ASKER

Hi war1 thanks for replying, customer support can send another one but this means purchasing it again. I'm not sure I will be able to recover the old one either, but was hoping someone may know a way, thing is... if they are that easy to recover then this wouldnt make them secure would it lol. Thanks anyway.

stefmahoney

First you would want to recover NTUSER.dat from your profile and the rest of the registry from windows\system32\config. Then you can open it in regedit. That part isn't too bad. The problem you face is once you are at that point you have to determine where it's stored, and possably deal with an encrypted part of the registry. Not impossible though.

What type of Certificate is it? (Root, Trusted authority, personal, etc.) That will matter make a difference where is it stored in the registry.

keepa

ASKER

Hi stefmahoney, thanks also for replying, it is a personal certificate!

Dmitri Farafontov

Personal certiciates are usually stored under a subfolder in your profile under C:\Documents and Settings\<YourLogon>. I recommend using Wininternals Admin CD, it will give you a Windows like interface so you can actually browse that folder.

keepa

ASKER

Hi deltafire, can I do this even though the hard drive is unbootable??

keepa

ASKER

Well i managed to recover the 'ntuser.dat' from the corrupt HDD and thought i would try replacing my ntuser.dat file with it, but when i tried to logon it wouldnt let me because the ntuser.dat looks at the registry and obviously my registry is different to the one on the corrupt hard drive, also i was not able to recover 'windows\system32\config' from the corrupt HDD as nothings appears in the windows folder when using a recovery program. I really need to be able to boot up from this HDD, ive tried reinstalling MBR to no avail, if anyone has any other ideas i would be most grateful. Thanks.

Dmitri Farafontov

Did you look in your user profile under C:\Documents and Settings\YourID? Alternative idea would be to boot into other OS, which can recognize the partition and than get that certificate copied over. Something like Knoppix Linux live CD, which is going to boot your machine from the CD itself. You can get it here http://www.knoppix.net/get.php Hopefully it will the partition and allow you mount it.

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Dave_Dietz

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keepa

ASKER

Thanks Dave, I had a feeling I wouldnt be able to retrieve it, was just hoping someone might know a way :-) anyway we have had to purchase another one, it's annoying these companies can't send a replacement one, I'm making sure this one gets backed up lol. Thanks all for your suggestions, not sure how I should sort these points out now lol yet another dilemna lol.

Dmitri Farafontov

keepa, we have not heard from you please finalize your question :))