Recover Any Windows 7/8/10 Product Key (Serial)
Welcome to an Exosploit Tutorial, today I'm going to be showing you how to recover or locate your Windows Product keys.
Your Windows product key is very useful to have in case you ever need to re-image your computer so you will be able to install Windows again. The first place you can look for you Windows product key is on a Certificate of Authenticity sticker if you bought a computer manufactured from a major retailer like Asus or Dell. The COA sticker verifies that the computer came with an authentic copy of Windows, and that sticker has a product key printed on it.
If you have a Windows 7-era PC, there’s a good chance the PC’s key is a single registration key the manufacturer uses for all their PCs. Thanks to “System Locked Pre-installation,” you’re not allowed to use that key to install Windows. If you try, you’ll get error messages about the key being invalid.
The sticker could be under your battery if you have a laptop, but usually it is on the bottom, and if you have a desktop it could be on the top, side, back or bottom. If you have a custom built PC your sticker might have been applied to your case, if not it could be on your Windows installation disk case if you received that. You’ll need that product key to reinstall Windows, and if the computer manufacturer used a System Locked Pre-installation, that key is going to be different from the one your PC came with in software.
If you don't have your certificate of authenticity sticker you're not out of luck, here is a nice little visual basic script you can run, I've copied it int he description below. Simply paste it in notepad and then save as all file types and name it what ever you want but make sure it's a dot vbs extension. Now execute your file and it will pop up your machine's registration key.
pastebin.com/J7... (Visual Basic script)
If, however, you have a newer machine, sometimes the keys are stored in your computer's BIOS and not inside the OS itself, this is great because if you want to reinstall you won't have to enter your key, as long as you install the same version of your OS it will auto enter your key. If you would like to make a copy of your key, just in case, and your key is stored in the BIOS, you can recover the key using a power shell command. Open power shell and paste this line in and run it, I've included the command in my description. If your key is stored in the BIOS you will get a line returned with your registration key. My key however is not stored int he BIOS, so I got a blank line.
(Get-WmiObject -query 'select * from SoftwareLicensingService').OA3xOriginalProductKey (Powershell command)
Finally, what if your computer cannot boot and your key is not stored in the BIOS and you don't have a certificate of authenticity sticker? Well there's a handy little free program called ProduKey. You can search for it and download it from NirSoft's website. Once you download it extract the ProduKey.exe from your zip file. On this Windows 10 machine I have the hard drive of a Windows 7 machine hooked up and it's loaded up as Local Disk F:
I'm going to run ProduKey.exe as an administrator and it will show me my current system's Windows 10 registration key. If I want to find my Windows 7 key I can go to File - Select Sources and then choose the 4th option down, "Load the product key from external Software Registry hive". You may be able to choose "Load key from external Windows Directory" and navigate to that, but it wasn't working for me. So then you'll just browse your connected drive's \Windows \Ststem32 \config \SOFTWARE file and click OK. Instantly it should pickup and display your other machine's Windows registration key.
If you have any questions or comments about this process just leave them below and I will get back to you. Thanks for watching!
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