Where is Win 2000 pro serial number?

zacspeed_2

I need to reload a pc (board & cpu dead), & I need to know which folder the product key resides in. PLEASE dont tell me about the magic jellybean keyfinder & all the countless other .exe's I can get hold of - the machine won't boot (I'll put the HDD into a.n.other machine).

Thanx in advance.
z.

GreenNotM

Well you could down load ...... :rotfl:

Try booting the Drive as the master drive (aka as it was in the dead pc ) in the new PC as long as the power managment and "chips" are similiar you may get it to boot into Windows and just need to tune/load the drivers - try a safe boot F8 etc ...

saying above as the original product Key will be on a COA sticker on the case of the old PC or disk case - it gets hashed into windows...

hendersonb

The serial number is held in the registry - not sure if you can access that when booted from another machine

John_Gray

I posted something recently about ProduKey (just a 36 KB download!), which says that it can "load product key information from another operating system on the same computer". I haven't tried it other than on my working hard disk, but it would be interesting to know if you can get it to produce information from a hard disk different from the one booted...

John

albertross_2

You could get a win98 bootfloppy from https://www.bootdisk.com

then run this

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NtfsDos.html

which should give you access to the file system.

The registry is stored in

\windows\system32\config\software

usually, you'll need some type of dos string scanner to find it though. This may help:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Strings.html

zacspeed_2

Thanks for all you suggestions guys - your a real mine of useful information!