WTF did you do this time..................

Well, there is a handy, little "feature" on all WinXP Pro machines, called EFS. It is keyed to user accounts, and was designed to protect the data encypted with it, even if the hardware was lost or stolen.

Unfortunately, WinXP apparently chose to encrypt big chunks of my data without my consent. After my WinXP Pro SP2 installation failed the other day, and I installed WinVista on the partition (it runs great, by the way), I have, apparently, wiped the cryptographic key required to access my data, so now three of my hard drives are full of encrypted files, just sitting there, and there's nothing I can do. I cannot move, copy or read them without the original key from my account, so it all might as well be lost.

I tried everything and now, after consulting with some experts, I'm pretty sure that there is nothing I can do, because the key was overwritten by the WinVista installation and I couldn't recover it from the hard drive.

I got so frustrated that I almost started cutting myself yesterday. This is a nightmare. No one ever told me about this EFS bullshit, and now it appears that thousands of people were hit in exactly same way, after their main installation died. Fuck me.