In cursory For the longest time Windows PCs came with a product central sticker that was placed exterior of the machine or with your computer'southward manuals. But in recent years manufacturers started storing this license within the machine's UEFI/BIOS and the information is automatically retrieved and practical when reinstalling the operating system. Certainly a better approach overall. In other instances, for example if you built and installed your Bone, your key is associated with your Microsoft business relationship, and so there is no way to "lose information technology" anymore. Read on for more details.

Microsoft has been changing and improving the mode it handles Windows licenses. We'll embrace all you demand to know in this article, from old school ways to recollect keys, to the more modern approaches to brand skilful utilise of your licenses and what restrictions may use depending on your type of license.

Windows x introduced a "Digital Entitlement" chemical element to Microsoft's license which links your Windows key to an ID generated based on your PC'due south hardware. But considering your hardware can significantly change if y'all upgrade your hardware, this entitlement was expanded to get a "Digital License" when 2016's Anniversary Update (1607) arrived.

This means your Windows x license now ties Windows keys to Microsoft accounts, letting y'all activate a re-create of the operating arrangement only by logging in with valid online credentials. Then, if you take a newer Windows PC or you lot already log in using your Microsoft account, you generally shouldn't have to search for your original Windows x central. We will explain that in improve detail in a infinitesimal.

There may be other scenarios where yous may still want to manually find a Windows key stored in your UEFI/BIOS, or prevent this key from automatically being applied during installation. Non to mention that dissimilar weather apply for non-OEM retail keys, too equally those given to people who upgraded to Windows 10 for free. And in a worst case scenario, y'all might be trying to find the license for a copy of Windows that no longer boots.

Editor's Notation: This characteristic was originally published on December 2018. Information technology'due south simply as relevant today, and so we've bumped information technology as function of our #ThrowbackThursday initiative.

Windows OEM keys vs. retail vs. free upgrade

At that place are many types of Windows licenses with varying terms of use. As a general rule of thumb:

  • OEM keys are shipped with a specific computer and tin can't be transferred to another machine. Again, these should be auto-applied from your UEFI/BIOS when reinstalling Windows on a modernistic boxed PC, but you tin can too remember them manually.
  • Retail keys are purchased directly from Microsoft, Amazon etc. -- these can exist transferred to another machine and that process should happen automatically for a digital license, though you lot can also "uninstall" a Windows key from a given PC.
  • Those who upgraded to Windows 10 for costless from Windows 7 and viii don't have a unique Windows 10 key. This can merely be transferred to one other auto (not if y'all upgraded from an OEM key). Free upgrade licenses are a digital entitlement.

Do I have a digital license?

The Windows 10 Settings app has a page for displaying your activation information, including whether you have a digital license, though your central isn't shown here:

Become to: Settings > Update & Security > Activation

If you take a digital license, you should come across "Windows is activated with a digital license" or "Windows is activated with a digital license linked to your Microsoft account."

Yous can also link a Microsoft account to a Windows license by clicking "add a Microsoft Account" on the bottom of the same page and providing your login information.

Find your key from inside Windows

Entering the following lines into an admin Command Prompt or PowerShell worked to display the OEM key embedded in our arrangement's UEFI/BIOS. However, these commands didn't return any keys on other two machines we used for testing despite Windows 10 existence activated.

wmic path softwarelicensingservice get OA3xOriginalProductKey

or

powershell "(Get-WmiObject -query 'select * from SoftwareLicensingService').OA3xOriginalProductKey"

In that location's also a ordinarily cited Visual Basic script that retrieves registry-based Windows keys (not those stored in the UEFI/BIOS). You can download the script here. Copy this text and paste it into Notepad, saving it as a .vbs file. And then double-click to launch the file.

Nosotros downloaded a variety of utilities that can retrieve retail keys from the Windows registry equally well equally those that are UEFI/BIOS-spring. In testing, some of the applications found both the registry and UEFI/BIOS keys, while others simply worked for one or the other:

Nirsoft ProduKey - Plant both the embedded OEM primal likewise as the retail key from our currently running re-create of Windows. Also includes keys for many other applications such as Microsoft Office and Adobe products (strangely, Net Explorer was also included in our results, though no key was provided). Equally with some of the other tools on this listing, ProduKey can load Windows keys from external sources/drives.

ShowKey Plus - This utility also found both our retail and OEM keys, and can load the SOFTWARE hive file from another Windows installation.

Windows 10 Product Fundamental Tool - Made past the developer of EasyBCD, this tool located our UEFI OEM key merely didn't find the retail license on our Windows To Go drive.

Winkeyfinder - Found our retail cardinal but Dell's UEFI OEM primal wasn't displayed.

Magical Jelly Bean KeyFinder - Returned the retail key but not the UEFI OEM cardinal. This software tin can also load registry keys from Windows installations on other drives (tools > Load Hive). Listed our Windows 10 Pro install equally Enterprise.

Find your key from outside Windows

If you can't boot into Windows and desire to recollect that key, you can withal admission this data from an external environment such as a Windows To Go drive, or past attaching your not-booting Windows drive to another machine.

Note that if you're recovering the cardinal from a Windows To Become workspace, the not-booting drive with your Windows fundamental is offline past default and volition take to exist enabled in Deejay Management (diskmgmt.msc). Right-click the drive and set it as "online." As mentioned in a higher place, several of the third-party tools that nosotros already listed will allow you load the registry hive file from another Windows installation.

You can also navigate to your license directly from the Windows registry (regedit via Start) though the key is not in obviously text. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ and wait for "DigitalProductId" in the correct panel.

This registry hive is stored in a file on your Bone bulldoze at Windows\System32\Config -- look for the file named SOFTWARE.

In testing, both ProduKey and ShowKey Plus loaded the SOFTWARE hive file and displayed the cardinal for an external Windows installation via Windows To Become. As well notation that ProduKey can search for Windows keys on computers at remote domains among other locations, and that the Windows Registry Editor can load hive files from other installations:

  • Open the Windows Registry Editor (enter regedit via Offset)
  • Click HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and then it's selected
  • Click File > Load Hive and navigate to the SOFTWARE file in Windows\System32\Config on your other drive
  • Enter a name for this external hive file
  • The hive should announced as a sub-entry in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
  • To unload the hive, select the name yous chose and go to File > Unload Hive

Retrieving the UEFI/BIOS-bound Windows central via Linux was every bit unproblematic as inbound the post-obit line in a terminal, though we couldn't discover any GUI applications like ProduKey or ShowKey Plus that would retrieve the license from a registry hive file:

sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM | tail -i

The control-line tool Chntpw can be installed on Linux and is able to load Windows registry files. This software didn't return a valid cardinal when decoding the production ID within the tool, though if yous had to you lot could excerpt the hex data and decode that elsewhere.

If you have a boot disc around, Chntpw (also known as Offline NT Password & Registry Editor) is role of many all-in-one recovery solutions such every bit Ultimate Boot CD and Hiren's Boot CD.

Here's how to load a Windows registry file in Chntpw from a Linux terminal and and then display the hex value for the key in that hive (utilise dpi instead of hex to decode the cardinal within chntpw, though again, this didn't give united states of america a valid key):

chntpw -east YourDrive/Windows/System32/config/SOFTWARE

hex Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\DigitalProductId

Additional resource

Although information technology's convenient to accept your Windows key automatically detected from the UEFI/BIOS, you'll have to tweak the Windows installation media if you lot want to use another license.

Open the installation media in File Explorer, browse to the Sources folder and create a new text file named PID.txt in the Sources folder. In PID.txt, you want the following text, where the Xs correspond to your license key.

[PID]
Value=XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX

Uninstalling a retail key from a given auto is also possible and while this doesn't automatically update the information on Microsoft'due south servers, it will forestall time to come conflicts from multiple machines using the same primal.

Enter the following line in an administrator Command Prompt to uninstall the currently active product license and clear that key from the Windows registry (hither are more slmgr commands):

slmgr.vbs /upk

slmgr /cpky

Equally a final anecdote from testing, when we uninstalled and cleared the key from our Windows installation, nosotros were able to reactivate that copy of Windows but past clicking "Troubleshoot" on the activation page.

One click and that sorcerer retrieved our digital license, despite not being linked to a Microsoft account. And again, this was for a retail key that was originally used on a desktop which was cloned as a Windows To Become drive and plugged into another machine with a unlike hardware profile. In other words, with luck, Microsoft's activation is forgiving enough and you should have no problems validating your OS license on a new motorcar or after several hardware changes.

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