How can I recover a GPG private key from a PC which has died?

Question

Long story short - PC with kleopatra processor died, and I only have a backup of my public key.

I've gone into the HDD and tried to re-jig kleopatra in the hope it would remember everything for me on another machine but that hasn't gone well...

Do I just need to get this HDD into a new PC and boot from it, then export my private key?

Solved - Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\gnupg contains everything you need :) — cam, Jan 19 '14 at 22:06
This question is about applications files management, not about security. @cam: Thank for feedback anyway;-) — F. Hauri - Give Up GitHub, Jan 20 '14 at 08:05

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 19 '14 at 22:36

You cannot recover from a public key to a private one – at least not within any kind of reasonable (computing) time. Being able to calculate a private key from the public one would circumvent encryption and would lead all efforts to ad absurdum.

You need to either:

Try to recover from an old backup (like you succeeded to do following your comment)
Revoke the key (on key servers) if you published it using a revocation certificate (you hopefully created). If you haven't, do so now.

There is no way to recover control over a lost private key – if there is no copy left, you've lost control over it.

How can I recover a GPG private key from a PC which has died?

1 Answers1