Missing disc - dead PC

[martindawson]

Interesting challenge here... my daughter's PC died; the MoBo keeled over. I've built her a new system, no worries, that one was a pretty old P3 anyway.

I was going to reinstall XP Pro but I can't find her CD nor, in particular, the folder with the key on it. It's unlikely the existing installation will boot up - having moved to a Sempron 64 from a P3 - though I will give it a whirl.

Now - the given the HDD still has all her previous installation on it and I can mount it as an extra drive on one of my operational PCs, Is it possible to extract her XP key information from the registery files on that HDD using my running system? Will the code information I extract from there be any use given the hardware signature will have changed significantly - i.e. what I really want is the CD key which is on the CD folder... wherever it got to.

Cheers,
Martin

[webmaster]

But Im sure for one thing.
Put your Old Hard drive in the new system then it will boot up for sure 100%.
But here are the steps that will help you retrieve the key!
1: start the sytem with your old Hard drive in the enw m/c [ machine ]
2: During boot up, press The function key F8
3: that will bring up a menu with options to load windows normally and in dos mode and in Safe mode!
4: select to boot windows in safe mode [ no dirvers will be loaded ]
5: Now run winkeyfinder or winkeylite get your product key save it or right it down some where!
6: restart ur system or shutdown ur system and start installing your new Windows!

This works for sure I have tried this before on my older machine Regards!
Need more help just let me know here!

[Somydi]

I have a similar problem with my Dad’s PC. The computer does the non-stop reboot no matter what selection I make in the alternate startup screen. After further research on this problem is sounds like corrupt boot up files. I took the hard drive out and placed in it another computer as a slave and am able to view the contents of the drive and ran Maxtor tests on it to see if the drive was bad. All is good with the drive and I was able to copy his files off for a backup. Now prior to trying a XP repair or reinstall over existing, I would like to retrieve the XP software info just in case I have to do a full reinstall. Is there any way of telling the Winkeyfinder program to look at the other drive’s XP install and extract the necessary information?

I am also open to any other suggestions.

[webmaster]

Im looking ways for this to be done.
This is what imran said. I'm in touch with him he says he is working on it.
That means you can expect this in version 1.73 or 1.80 depends what version number he keeps :d.

[Imran]

There was one request earlier to this one, the person who requested also sent one mail a week earlier, but i'm little busy, I will sure try to implement this not sure how to look for a registry data in offline disc.
I will give it a try though.
Thanks regards.

[trekuhl]

boot to safe mode first, remove the drivers for all the IDE ATA, the COMPUTER, and under the SYSTEM DEVICES the PCI bus.

if you can get into windows, then it will redetect everything, and MS will ask to you activate again as your hardware has changed drastically.

if you still cant get in, then usually biggest prob is the IDE driver. specially if it is sata/raid that isnt loaded in windows at all.

also make suer disk is in same position as before (master/slave on pri/sec) otherwise edit boot.ini file to reflect hardware location of drive.