i have never got this tool to actually work, can anyone tell me what i am doing wrong?

Can you tell us, what you do to read the key, and what happend ?

Joshua

I've used it on many occasions and it has always been flawless. At work one of the techs was complaining about not being able to get the key off of a system. I had him boot RC5 (I think that was the version we had ready at the time) and KeyFinder found it with no problems.

Well, i launch the tool, and browse to the windows installation directory on my HDD and hit search. get error loading hive.


the regurlar keyfinder works fine in realmode

That is realy strange !
Can you make a test on the same system with my Keyfinder-pe plugin from my website ?
may be it gives you a better error code???

Joshua

yours works Perfectly. Flawlessly even. Interestingly enough after running yours, the other one works just fine......

Am going to reboot and try again, will let ya'll know

btw, i kinda like yours better anyhow, expecially w/the read unat-inst key, local and remote options....

may be i use a better way to load/unload hives ?

Joshua

Ok, now im really confused

on reboot the default keyfinder worked just fine



i think im going to add yours just because, it never hurts to have duplicates, and since yours does more, why not

I've seen this same problem with KeyFinder-PE. I'll also try Joshua's version and report back.

that is a good choice, because next version will also read office keys.

Joshua

I rebuilt the CD with Joshua's Keyfinder-PE plugin and it works. But so does the KeyFinder PE that is included with UBCD4WIN V3.0! Not sure what to make of this.

I didn't even realize that Joshua had his own version, or I would have asked him if we could include it in 3.0.

I've never had problems with KeyFinderPE (that is in the project now) and this is the first time I've read of problems with it....so I never thought of alternatives.

Yeah, I know this is a really old thread, but I searched the forum and this thread was already here and it's exactly what I was going to post, so here I am. First, let me just say the UBCD4Win is AWESOME! I have been using it since 2005 and I love it! But- I have NEVER had the Keyfinders that are included actually give me a product key. NEVER. They always report 'Error loading hive' or 'Unable to open hive' or 'Cannot locate correct hive'. Currently I'm using the new UBCD4Win (v3.1.1) and Joshua's keyfinder actually says "Successfully load hive software" but about 3 seconds later it errors with "Could not unload Software-Hive" and never produces a key. This is a new error. I tried using it 4 or 5 times in a row on the same PC (Sony laptop running Vista Home Premium) and this is the first time it actually said that the hive loaded successfully. I have used older versions of UBCD4Win (I burned one in March 2006 that I used from then up until 3 days ago) and the keyfinder in that one never worked on any PCs either. It's not a big deal because I have numerous other methods of getting the product from a non-booting hard drive, but it would be nice if the included keyfinders worked...

Thanks for reading.... any suggestions, help, and/or ideas will be appreciated

Those tools are made for XP and 2003... not Vista.... I've NEVER had them not work

I pretty much figured that it wasn't going to work with Vista, but it did eventually get the product key on Vista. I had to run it like 7 times in a row, and click OK as quick as possible on the errors that came up, but eventually a key was produced. It didn't match the key on the sticker, but that's probably an OEM thing and it's normal.

Anyway- the point is, over the past two years, I have NEVER (until an hour or two ago) had any of the UBCD4Win keyfinder programs work. Never. I am going to try it a few more times with XP though, and if I was too hasty, or flat out wrong, I'll have no problem with that either. Like I said before, it really isn't a big deal; I have several other ways to get a product key while running the UBCD4Win (SIW for example)... I was thinking maybe I was doing something wrong, until I came across this thread and realized that other folks have had the same experiences.... in any case, it's all good, and I think the UBCD4Win is absolute genius. That fact that a team of dudes is out there, and someone at some point said "hey- lets get Windows to run from a CD and load it up with great tools and make it able to surf the web and burn CDs and play games and do maintenance and remove viruses" and then they actually DID it!!! And they give it away on the web for free, amazing!!! Anyway- I'm rambling and getting all emotional here....

The only thing I can think of is that the product key can easily be removed from the registry (for security reasons?). The process of retrieving the product key is actually pretty simlpe.

The product key is embedded in the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\DigitalProductID" registry key which is a binary value 164 bytes long. The product key is at bytes 52-66 and is base-24 encoded.

See HERE for some simple VB code.

HERE'S a compiled EXE

Well, I have now tried both the keyfinders (joshua's and whatever the other one is called) on several PCs that are all running some flavor of XP (Home, Media Center, Pro) and they both worked on 5 out 6 computers. What's weird is that the one that didn't work was a different PC for each keyfinder. Strange. I also tried again (for the bazillionth time) to use my old UBCD4Win that I burned back in March 2006 and still cannot get the keyfinder to work on ANY computers, but v3.11 and v3.12 are working fine.... so I may have been a bit hasty in posting