PFILES and WINDOWS 10 NIGHTMARE WITH SUPPORT

Question

Ok here is my problem:

I was using Windows 7 Professional. I had a flash drive that was scanned before opening with no problems, it was working fine. 

Kept getting upgrade pop up so I did to Windows 10

I typed a letter is Word 2010 saved it as I always have to the Flash drive as a word document (no difference in what I have always done)

That evening I went to my work office (they are running Windows 7 Professional) and tried to print that letter. It would not open. The flash drive  had all my files there but all of them had been changed.

For example Document title was Sylviaishere.doc     now it shows in the folder as Sylviaishere.docx.PFILE   the folder type is PFILE File and it is 44KB in size. I also noticed when i looked at properties that the majority were now Read Only and also had all the boxes checked under Advanced Options. So I unchecked them and took it off read Only. Nothing worked

So I went home and tried to open on the computer the letter was created on- Windows 10. and it still would not open.

I tried a friends computer with Windows 7 and still nothing - comes up in jibberish.

A week of trying to open (over 8000 files used for business)

I restored my computer back to previous version (Windows 7 Professional)

Now I really am in deep poo- I need those contracts and files in order to work  so that night I:

7:00PM  I called Customer Support where I was told I needed to save files on a new device and then reload Windows 10, call back and he would fix it. (Paul- have service number and another number he gave me to reference)

9:00PM   I did that- of course when I called back I could not speak to him directly and so I was connected with another tech who worked on it remotely for over an hour and then decided she  also could not help me. however, she said my computer looked fine, the flash looked fine. She then said I needed Office Support and she would have to  transfer me. She tried but instead disconnected me.

10:30PM     I called back after looking the number up and spoke to another tech, repeating the story for the 5th time  who also had to transfer me.

YUP you guessed it......disconnected

(Repeated request for Supervisor- all denied)

11:30PM Finally got them on phone again - this time we made it all the way to where he was going to remotely access my computer and was waiting on passcode to generate and he too disconnected me. They can not operate a phone but they can fix my computer?

11:45 Call back recording said 30 minute wait time, however after about ten minutes recording said they were closed.

So here I am with a flash drive of PFiles and no idea how to restore them to original format. Not a computer techie, just basic user. Dell Computer, Windows 10 (at the moment) and Office 2010- Flash drive was not a cheap one and it was working fine prior to saving the file with/in Windows 10. I have full authority to these files, they are not shared, computer does not have virus, I have created another document saved it and then reopened and it also saved as a PFile.  

Word documents nnow saved as  xxxtitlexx.doc.PFILE

Excel now saved as xxxtitle,cxs,PFILE

PDF's now saved as xxxtitle.pdf.PFILE

JPEGS now saved as xxxtitlexxx.jpeg.PFILE

pNG now saved as xxxtitlexx.png.PFILE

none will open in Windows 7, 7 Professional, or 10

All were created and saved on the same computer

No permission or encryption or file sharing

i am seriously in hurt - can anyone help me convert these files back to original format. There are over 8000 contract documents on this flash saved in all formats. Please help I am despreate!

Thank you in advance

Sylvia

Answer 1

I just ran into this problem, and this was the first result on Google. I figured this out, and felt I should share.

I had a folder full of files I had encrypted on my storage drive using Windows 10. When I copied them to my flash drive. Windows 10 maintained the encryption, and still showed me those attributes when I viewed the flash drive.

When I took that same flash drive out and plugged it into a machine running an older version of Windows (in this case, Windows 8.1 Professional) the files did not list as encrypted. Instead, they showed with the .PFILE extension, and Windows 8.1 had no idea what to do with them. (It offered to search the Store for something to handle .PFILEs, which isn't helpful.)

The solution, once I figured this out, was simply to plug my Flash Drive back into my Windows 10 computer that had created the files, then right-click on the folder, select [Advanced], and un-check the box to "Encrypt contents to secure data." Doing this took a few minutes while the changes were applied, and after that, my Windows 8.1 machine (and presumably all other machines) could read the files without issue.

I'm not sure what the root cause is for the confusion, but I would guess that Windows 10 changed the way that encrypted files are stored on disk somehow compared to prior Windows versions. In either case, I figured I'd leave this here in case anyone else runs into something similar. I'm really curious about what would have happened if I had another Windows 10 machine to test the encrypted files on, but I've just got my own two machines here to play with.

Answer 2

I don't care about Windows Rights Management and SharePoint, I just need to resolve this biting problem. I read the RMS information and it did state that PFILE extension was created by Microsoft as an encrypted file extension. If that is the case the should been able to resolve that fast. The people that have experienced the problem are always people upgraded to windows 10 and downgraded back to Windows7.

This need this reverse because I trusted Microsoft and saved my important files on Microsoft Office prof  2010, Now  .pfile are added to my files to make the useless for me. I removed changed the extension and nothing works.

Answer 3

Like Rohn007, I have no experience with the Microsoft Rights Management Sharing application, but you can download it from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40857 .

Of course, it is possible that this has nothing to do with Microsoft Rights Management at all. Strange filename extensions might be caused by ransomware, a sort of virus.

Answer 4

google is your friend ...

searching for .pfile I instantly found several entries like this:

http://www.file-extensions.org/pfile-file-extension

Short form .PFile is the MS DRM, Digital Rights Management, extension.  Your files are now encrypted by Windows 10.

That is the breadcrumb. Sorry, I don't have more of an answer, I'm not familiar with the details of using this feature of Windows.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn197834%28v=vs.85%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

http://fo.peterboswell.net/blog/2014/3/11/microsoft-rights-management.aspx

Answer 5

You should NEVER save a document from Word directly to any form of removable media.  Catastrophic, irretrievable corruption of the document is almost certain to occur.

Documents should ALWAYS be saved to the local drive and if there is a need to take them to another computer, they should be copied from the local drive to the removable media using Windows Explorer or File Explorer (as it is named in later versions of Windows) and on the other computer, you should copy it from the removable media to the local drive and then open that copy on the local drive.

However, if you want to send me one of the Word documents, I will see if anything can be done with it.