If you’ve lost the Product Key of your Windows installation, you can find it using Keyfinder or other utilities. But how to recover the Product Key which is needed for reinstallation, if your computer has crashed and the Operating System does not load?
ProduKey is a small utility from Nirsoft, that displays Product Keys of MS-Office, Windows, Exchange Server, and SQL Server installed on your computer. You can view this information for your current running operating system, or for another operating system/computer – by using command-line options. ProduKey works on all 32-bit versions of Windows. However, some features, like viewing the product keys of another operating system instance, are only supported on Windows 2000/XP.
If your Windows system does not start, then you can include ProduKey utility with BartPE or ERD Commander Boot CD and then run offline. Another option is to connect the hard disk to a working computer as a slave drive, and then retrieve the product key.
Retrieving the Product Key Offline
1. Create a BartPE boot CD including the ProduKey executable in a custom folder. Start BartPE boot environment.
(Or, connect the hard drive as slave to another working computer. Run ProduKey utility in that computer.)
2. Run ProduKey.exe that was added to a custom folder.
3. From the File menu, click Select Source
4. Select Load the product keys from external Software Registry hive
5. Click the Browse button and locate the Software registry hive (of unbootable Windows installation), which is present in the Windows\System32\Config folder.
6. Click OK.
The OK button at the bottom of the window may not be visible when using ProduKey from BartPE. In that case, select the Software registry hive and press ENTER.
The product keys that are available in the Software registry hive should be listed.
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The ProdKey tool worked great – just what I was looking for! I had a hard drive go bad, computer would not start. Windows Vista was installed. I connected the drive to another computer and ran the tool. It was able to find the product key right away using the Windows directory on the bad hard drive. Awesome!