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Michael Belletty

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Recovering Windows and other License Kays from Damaged hard Drive

is there an easy way to recover your Windows and other license keys from a damaged Windows Hard Drive.
I have a clients Hard Drive which is not readable in normal mod.  I have been able to recover user data using Getdataback software, but not sure how to recover or view License keys
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Fine.. You can use Nirsoft Product Key viewer

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html
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I don't know of any tools which will retrieve keys from a drive that damaged. Magic Jellybean software on the UBCD4Win will retrieve keys from a non-booting drive with the registry intact but that doesn't appear to be your situation.
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You'll have to use getdataback to also recover the windows directory, and then use the UBCD4Win mentioned by willcomp above and it's System Information for Windows (remote). You can then select the windows partition you just recovered, and then in the Licenses section you will see all the keys that were installed, provided you managed to recover all relevant data with getdataback. Below is the Link to the UBCD4WIN:

http://ubcd4win.com
As long as you recovered the SOFTWARE hive, either from:

c:\windows\system32\config
or
C:\System Volume Information\_restore{GUID}\RP<NUMBER>\snapshot in the form of _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SOFTWARE, many of these will work....

I did this about a week ago using Produkey in the link above. Only caveat.... If you have more than one _REGISTRY_MACHINE_SOFTWARE (cant remember if I had to rename it to just "SOFTWARE"), it would be nice to have them readily available, in case the file was damaged during recovery.....