I can not import my certificate

[Michale Jasson]

My problem is that I can not import my certificate into my new installation of Thunderbird/enigmail.

I do have a revoke certificate (*rev.asc") but I did not export the certificate from the old Destop PC.
The reason for that is that that the old PC stopped working unexpectedly (power supply unit broken), so I didn't have time to export the certificate/ key-pairs. But I do have access to the hard disk drive of the old PC. The old installation was on Windows XP, the new installation is on Windows 10. I am using enigmail 1.9.9 now, don't know axactly what the enigmail version was on the old install.

Is it possible to extract my old certificate/key-pairs from this hard disk ? And if so, where do I find the certificate files. - I again found *rev.asc on the old hard disk in the Thunderbird Profile, but this obviously doesn't help for importing the certificate/key-file. Or do I have to revoke the old certificate and set up a new one ?

Thanks for any help

[Patrick Brunschwig]

It is possible to extract your old files. Open the profile directory of your old windows (something like C:\Documents and Settings\yourId\Application Data

There should be a directory called GnuPG, containing at least two files: secring.gpg and pubring.gpg. These contain all your public keys and all your secret keys.

Copy these two files to your new computer, and import them using the command line (in the sequence I wrote):

gpg --import pubring.gpg
gpg --import secring.gpg

The restart Thunderbird, and you should see the keys in the Key Manager.