Recovery options if Master Key is not available but previous instance files available

We are in a situation where we have currently lost our VM which hosted Octopus Manager application but we have the Octopus Database available and we want to re-use same Database by installing Octopus Manager application but it is expecting Master key which currently we do not seem to find.
However I was able to get files from mounted VHD from lost VM hence when tried octopus.server.exe show-master-key command it failed with below-

F:\Program Files\Octopus Deploy\Octopus>octopus.server.exe show-master-key
Octopus Deploy: Server version 3.1.6 (3.1.6+Branch.master.Sha.331b6019ef669b9186
a7a8ce375dd9c1ea8c14fd)

Error: The default instance of OctopusServer has not been created. Either pass -
-instance INSTANCENAME when invoking this command, or run the setup wizard.

Full error details are available in the log files.

Can you recommend any recovery options if Master Key is not available but previous instance files available?

Hi Abhishek,

Thanks for getting in touch. It’s important to note that Octopus is designed to be secure therefore you need your master key to recover your Octopus instance and work with the existing database again. The Octopus master key is encrypted by Windows, using a private key known only by Windows, thus we need the windows instance to be operational to retrieve the master key. This means that you’ll need to be able to boot the VM image as the certificate used by Octopus is stored in the windows server instance. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to be able to access the file system.

If you have an older backup or snapshot of the virtual machine which is bootable, then you should be able to retrieve the master key via any of the methods describe on the following page. http://docs.octopus.com/display/OD/Security+and+encryption

Hope this helps!

Rob