Windows 10: Get windows 10 key off of corrupted hard drive?

OK, so I've been in some deep crap with my computer lately. I just built a new system over the summer andg ot windows 10 on it by installing windows 7 (because I had an unused product key for it) then upgrading to windows 10. It worked perfectly for the first few months but then about 2 months ago, it started to get stuck while booting into windows. It would reach the desktop and begin to load stuff then just stop. The HDD led would stop lighting up and nothing would happen until I force shut down and turned it on again. At first I would only have to restart once and it would boot fine, but over time, I would have to restart 4-5 times.

One day my computer just wouldn't even load windows at all. It would show the bios splash screen then when it tried to boot all it was was just a black screen with a blinking underscore. I couldn't type anything and the only thing I could do was turn it off. What I'm pretty sure is giong on is that the boot media on the hard drive got corrupted from the forced restarts and eventually just wouldn't boot. I tried using windows 10 installation media to try and repair the system but it ended up failing. I eventually took my hard drive out of my old computer that my brother uses so that I still have a computer to use. I copied my 300 or so GB of games over and copied all of my personal files over to the hard drive that works and then I was just going to reinstall windows 10, but the thing is, I need the product key but i can't unhook it from the system because I can't boot into the OS it's stored on.


So long story short, I need a way to extract a product key from a hard drive I can't boot into. I am able to get onto a windows OS on a different drive, but I don't know how to unhook the key from the other HDD so i can use it again on the exact same system.

:)

 

Get account data off of old win 10 hard drive that forced upgrade bricked

You can consider the following for recovering data from the non-booting disk:

How
to recover data from a non booting hard disk

 

Get account data off of old win 10 hard drive that forced upgrade bricked

Before removing the old disk did you do a backup?

 

If you upgraded from Windows 7 previously on that computer, the Windows 10 on that same computer won't activate via a product key. It will activate via a digital entitlement stored on Microsoft activation servers. Everyone who upgrades from Windows 7/8/8.1 gets the same product key:

Windows 10 Home - YTMG3-N6DKC-DKB77-7M9GH-8HVX7
Windows 10 Home SL- BT79Q-G7N6G-PGBYW-4YWX6-6F4BT
Windows 10 Pro - VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T

 

So I just type in this key and it will activate?

 

I posted the wrong key, and corrected it. If Windows 10 did not activate itself without the product key, it won't activate with the generic product key, but you can try.

Activation in Windows 10 - Windows Help

 

So i can click skip activation?

 

If you are doing a clean install on a computer that has been upgraded to Windows 10 before, then you can either skip entering the product key, or enter the generic key, either way. Replacing a hard drive does not make it a new computer, so it isn't supposed to affect activation.

 

Alright cool! thanks for the help!