It sounds like something out of a fairy tale, and this week it was so useful it almost was! I had a user whose drive was failing and needed to be replaced, so I set him up with a new one. I then took his old drive and put it in an enclosure, that allowed it to connect via USB so he could access all of his data. Unfortunately, he had no record of the key for his Microsoft Office installation. Yikes, that could be an expensive thing to have to purchase again!
Thank goodness for Magic Jelly Bean products! They make key finders, that scan the registry of your system for the keys of software you have installed. I've mentioned SIW before, and I adore it, but it doesn't find keys on external drives.The free version is just called Key Finder, and they make an fancier yet still inexpensive version called Recover Keys for more elusive and harder to recover keys. Simply download, install and run for data on your own drive. For keys on an external drive, like the situation above, you simply use the "load hive" feature and point it to the Windows installation on the drive. Voila! All the information you need to reinstall that expensive software on the new drive.
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