# Old PGP encrypted files



## watcher (Sep 4, 2006)

I discovered about 5-10 files on an old back up drive which I encrypted anywhere from 10 to 20 years ago using PGP back when it was open and free. I'd like to decrypt them but I'm not having much luck.

I dl'ed GnuPG and tried using it but clearly I'm doing something wrong. Is there a command which will just decrypt a file? IIRC, with the old PGP you just typed in the command to decrypt and the file name then it either prompted you for the passphrase or you typed it in as part of the command line. You didn't need a key, just the passphrase. 

There are still a couple versions of the old PGP program in zip files on the drive but of course windows 10 will not run them. Is there a SIMPLE way to make windows 10 act like MS-DOS 5.1 or Win95 and then run the old school PGP?

Now remember I need to KISS because while there is a chance all the old white text on a black screen memories might come back about the only commands I can remember are "cd", "dir" and "wdir". Oh yeah there was "md" and "cls" as well.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

watcher said:


> Is there a SIMPLE way to make windows 10 act like MS-DOS 5.1 or Win95 and then run the old school PGP?


DOSBox was created to run MS-DOS games on contemporary Windows machines.

http://www.dosbox.com/

I don't know a lot about it. I fooled with it a while back and it did what I needed it to do.


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## watcher (Sep 4, 2006)

Nevada said:


> DOSBox was created to run MS-DOS games on contemporary Windows machines.
> 
> http://www.dosbox.com/
> 
> I don't know a lot about it. I fooled with it a while back and it did what I needed it to do.


I'll ck that out.


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## StL.Ed (Mar 6, 2011)

Do you still have your old keystore? When you recently installed GnuPG, did it reference/copy the old keystore?

IIRC...
Way back when, you probably generated a private/public key pair, and they are stored in your old keystore. The public key was used to encrypt the file, and the private key is needed to decrypt.
When you give the decrypt command, the passphrase is used to look up the private key in the keystore specified in your installation defaults file. Alternately, the decrypt command can override the default and specify the keystore to use.

Look around for an old file with a .keystore or, perhaps, a .jks extention, and make sure it's in a location GnuPG can find it.

Hope this helps,
Ed


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