Recover EFS certificate from windows.old or .vhd?

My SSD bit the dust, and I've lost my EFS encryption keys. There exists nowhere in windows.old a .pfx file to be found. I do have the credentials from

C:\Windows.old\Users\MyProfileName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\SystemCertificates\My\Certificates

I have a .vhd backup of the old drive, but it wasn't bootable with the new SSD. After two weeks of work, I wound up re-installing windows 7 and moving the old installation to windows.old.

I need to get the encryption keys out of windows.old so I can gain access to my encrypted files again. I have the windows.old directory and access to my old user profile, I have the .vhd file (which had issues booting with Virtual Machine--never got around to using third party apps). I also tried using "cipher /x" from within the recovery environment when I was logging in with the correct credentials, but it was telling me the system could not find the file specified.

How can I gain access to my encryption keys from my windows backup image or from my windows.old folders? Alternately, how do I migrate the .vhd to a new hard drive and actually boot the darn thing (bare metal recovery)? Isn't that the point of a whole disk image--to be able to back up to a new hard drive when the old one dies out?

Thanks.

Did you change the attributes to show hidden files and folders before you did the search, Default is hide.

Roy

Thats correct, sorry couldn't be more helpfull way outta my league.
On a side note had so many different passwords/keys, decided to put em on a stick.

Roy

just found this