The first tool to try and recover your Windows product key is Lazesoft Recover My Password Home Edition. If your key is from a sticker or has been typed in manually, these methods will work fine. This is a special generic key pre-installed at the factory and is NOT the same key as the one on a genuine sticker and cannot be used on a standard Windows re-install. If you have an OEM machine made by a manufacturer such as Dell, Sony, Asus etc, and have never re-installed Windows, your product key will be different. Special Note: An important thing which needs mentioning is there are 2 different types of Windows product key you might have installed on your system. But thankfully there are other ways you can do this by using very popular Live Windows CD’s that can get the key from a Windows system that cannot boot. We’ve tried very hard to look for a linux live CD that can retrieve the license key but couldn’t find an obvious one that doesn’t involve a long process. All those steps work but are a bit fiddly and time consuming. Or you can boot up PCRegedit, load the registry and then decrypt the key from a working computer. For example, taking out the hard drive and attaching it to a working machine, running a tool that can read product keys, load the registry hive from within the program and retrieve the product key.

There are a few ways to retrieve a key from an unbootable computer and most of them involve having access to another working computer. A big pain these days is Windows product key stickers on many machines such as laptops and netbooks are paper and don’t have the plastic protective coating meaning the key can easily become faint and impossible to read accurately. One very common and annoying problem that often arises is the user doesn’t have their Windows license to hand and you have to spend time in retrieving the genuine Windows product key from the system if the hard drive is readable. If you’re a computer technician or the neighborhood tech geek, quite frequently you could find yourself having to reinstall Windows for people.

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