Windows 10: Locate a Windows product key from a broken laptop hard drive.

A friend of mine is asking for my help. His laptop fell and it no longer reads that a hard drive is installed. I went through the steps and determined that the hard drive is damaged. I want to loan him an external so he can continue to use it until he gets a replacement internal hard drive. Is there a way to find the Windows key so that I can install it for him? The laptop will not boot up past diagnostics.

In case it matters, it's a Dell Inspiron.

:)

 

Laptop hard drive upgrade

If you ghost the OS from disk to disk with the same system it should work fine. Thing is you have to GHOST the disk, including the MBR or it won't be bootable. Any other normal laptop drive should work as long as the connections the same.



If you cannot make a backup install CD, you'll likely need to locate a windows install CD, unless you can ghost the drive. Thats pretty much your only options atm.

 

recover product key from laptop hard drive

hi, i had this dell laptop which came originally with vista, i bought win7 when it came out and kept using it, when the win 10 upgrade came i upgraded it to the insider version, but later the laptop died, the videocard gave up. but the hard drive was still
ok, so my question is, can i use this product key on my new pc that im building, if so how can i recover my product key from the hard drive, i put on a hard drive case so i could see if it was ok, thanks.

 

Hard drive/ OS issue

a guy suggested :

• shutdown
• unhooked HDD
• restarted
• yay !!
• reconnected HDD
• restarted
• yay !!

also , try method 3
How do I unlock the drive where Windows 10 is installed?