Recovering Windows Product Key

Kirk

I have a laptop I am repairing for someone as a side job, and I can't make heads or tails of the scraped up Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity sticker. Their hard drive failed, it might still be possible to get data off of it, but recovering their 140MB of documents took several hours, and required the freezer trick.

What is going to be the easiest way for me to get the key back? I don't think HP or Microsoft will help with it, and I can't boot up the old hard drive to run Belarc Advisor.

Anything I am not thinking of, or should I start making calls and see about ordering HP recovery CDs?

nikkigreg1974

What version of windows do you have? I have hp key for windows xp media center.

noone

Typically OEMs use a different product key than the ones on the COA, and from experience, trying to use the key (if it's recovered) used to originally reinstall it never activates properly. I used some program called Advanced Tokens Manager to pull keys off of machines before, but that requires to be ran within windows. Supposedly a release of Hiren's boot cd has tools on it to do that, but I've never checked mine to see.