How do I retrieve a lost serial number

May 11, 2006 1:43 PM

I had Micro$oft OneNote installed on my laptop. My laptop died (hard drive= OK) & I lost the install CD (which has the serial number). How do I get the serial number from the old install so I can register it on my new laptop?

So here's what I tried:

a) I connected the laptop hard drive as an external USB drive. I went to program files and started OneNote so I could look for the serial in Help -> about. But the program wont start.

b) How does one access the registry on a portable hard drive (w/o booting from it)? Would this be in the registry.


This is in or around Windows XP

posted by special-k to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Have you tried Magical Jelly Bean? This will likely only work on a running system, but you might be able to boot another system from the laptop hard drive (check your BIOS, most modern versions let you boot from a USB drive). Magical Jelly Bean is the easiest to use, but there are many other keyfinder tools out there. Googling "magical Jelly Bean" will tell you just about everything you need to know.
posted by leapfrog at 2:13 PM on May 11, 2006 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Magical Jelly Bean only retrives the Windows XP serial. It doesnt work for any other software installed on the machine.
posted by special-k at 3:37 PM on May 11, 2006

Best answer: Go to:

%SystemRoot%\System32\Config\
(typically:)
C:\WINDOWS\system32\config

Open up the file called software

Search for a key called "ProductID"
posted by Brian James at 4:03 PM on May 11, 2006

Hm. I thought it did more than that. Here's one that claims to do it, but costs $23.
posted by leapfrog at 4:04 PM on May 11, 2006

Was the software provided to you through an OEM? If so, give them a call and see if they have your license information on record.
posted by mr.dan at 4:26 PM on May 11, 2006

This is the main reason I keep a spreadsheet of installation keys, and a print-out of it in my CD book. Sometimes a pain to keep current but I've never had the opportunity to regret doing it and plenty of times when it saved me a lot of grief.
posted by trinity8-director at 4:52 PM on May 11, 2006

You can actually mount the old system's registry hives on the current running system, just using regedit. No need to open up the hives and manually search, just mount them as keys and then use regedit to search just like you would normally. When you're done unmount the hive.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:33 PM on May 11, 2006

Best answer: I guess I should have actually explained how you do this. Essentially you're doing what Brian James said but you're actually properly mounting the hive instead of just poking at it with a stick.

Run regedt32. Select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. Choose file -> Load Hive. Navigate to the system32\config directory of the old drive. Choose the desired hive, normally "software" but the other hives can be "system", "security", "sam", "hardware", etc. When prompted for a key name, choose something unique -- you don't want to interfere with your running system. So if you're looking at the "software" hive you might choose to mount this as "software_old".

Now you can just edit/search HKLM/software_old just as it used to be HKLM/software on your old system. When done remove the hive.

If the data you were interested in was in the HKCU tree, then the procedure is the same except you will need to choose the user hive (NTUSER.dat under the profile dir) rather than %windir%/system32/config.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:39 PM on May 11, 2006

Best answer: Thanks Brian James and Rhomboid.
That worked to some extent. I was able to retrieve the ProductID which is not the same as product key. So I still can't install but I can contact someone (Microsoft?) and ask if they'll send me a key (I'm sure i registered the product). Thanks again for all your help.
posted by special-k at 10:51 AM on May 12, 2006