Question: My friend’s laptop motherboard died and he needs his Windows 7 product key from the hard drive (which is still working).
I connected the old drive as a secondary drive to my own computer and tried using a key finder utility, but it just keeps showing my own product key and not his.
Is there a way to retrieve the product key from the old drive using my computer?
Answer: It s possible, but a little tricky. You need to extract the product key from the Windows registry hive files from the target drive.
There s different ways to do it, but probably the quickest and easiest way is with Nirsoft s ProduKey:
It should read the hive file from the other copy of Windows and display the appropriate product key.
In this screenshot, I ran ProduKey in Windows XP (installed in C:) and then extracted the key from Windows 7 (mounted as T:). Note how it still says C:Windows since Windows 7 was indeed installed in C:, even though it s files are currently accessible from T:.
