Where to find windows xp product key on hard drive

Click Next and then confirm in the popup you are using the program for non commercial use only. Now Lazesoft Recover My Password will search for and then display the Windows product key s for your system. The good thing is the program will automatically search all active Windows partitions you have on the system, and will show all the Windows product keys it comes across.

Lazesoft Recover My Password Home Edition is quite an impressive tool and seemed to work flawlessly on every system we tested it on. This second method uses the wildly popular Hirens Boot CD and an included utility from Nirsoft called Produkey which can retrieve Windows and also Office keys from a an offline Windows system. When Produkey loads press F9 to open the Select Source window. Refer to section 5b below on how to use it.

Even after re-downloading the ISO twice. Can there be a chance to retrieve my original product key and install the original windows 8. So what can someone with a OEM unbootable computer do? Is there anything? OEM means you had your computer built on the website, in my case HP, is that right? Sorry for being a noob. Quite true, if your label rubbed off Microsoft would simply try to sell you a new license. Notwithstanding the fact they changed the design of the sticker from the durable plastic covered XP version to the paper sticker for Vista and above.

Not really so. Hirens Boot CD is half of what it shoud be. It is very good to access a locked hard drive that was locked by a BIOS supervisor password, it is very good to have such a handy windows GUI interface to recover some files. In fact the produkey software works only for XP and not for Win7. The antivirus programs keep on failing. Only Claim AV did work on my laptop.

Usually cheaper than purchasing one at a big box store. I've done it. Give it a try. Good luck. Dias de verano Guest. You won't find the Windows product key on the install disk. It doesn't work like that. Think about it. If Microsoft included the key on the disk they'd have to make each disk of millions unique. Also it would be like printing the PIN on a bank card. Anyone who got hold of the disk could find the key and install the OS.

To install, what is needed is not " the " unique product key for that CD, there isn't one , but rather " a " product key that would work with that disk.

Microsoft make the disks so that they will work with a number out of a range, so that there is a range of valid XP Home numbers, another range of valid XP Pro numbers, etc.

The numbers go on the stickers that get stuck on the packaging, and sometimes on or inside the computer case if the machine is bought prebuilt from a retailer. As Geezedave says, once the OS is installed, the product key that was typed in by whoever installed the OS is stored on the system. If Windows XP came packaged with the computer and was not the retail version with box , the key recovered by such a tool may not be your own machines key but the OEM's bulk install key.

If you have manually entered a product key this will be the one returned. What to do if your computer has already crashed?

Simply take the hard drive out of your dead or unbootable computer, then attach it to another working computer as a slave or secondary drive. Using KeyFinder Plus program you can easily recover lost Windows and software product keys from the Windows registry file on your dead or unbootable hard drive.