Did I lose windows 7 forever?

jlundell

Distinguished
Dec 31, 2011
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18,510
The motherboard in my computer crashed and I'm going to be building a new one around Tuesday, but I just realized I don't have Windows. My old PC had 7 Ultimate on it, but I lost the disc and everything so I can't get the key. I tried hooking the HDD up to the bare mobo/cpu and starting up and retrieving the key but Windows couldn't start, it just kept crashing and saying it had to repair. I left it going for a while but the repair never finished so I gave up on that idea.

I still have the HDD with Windows and everything on it and I will be installing that drive into my new PC as storage, so I'm wondering if there is any way I can get the product key off that HDD some other way?
 

mbreslin1954

Distinguished
If you can install the corrupted hard disk as an extra drive in another computer, then you can scan it or run chkdsk on it and possibly repair it, assuming just the file system is corrupt. At least you should be able to run something like Produkey.exe to find your Windows key.