Monthly Archives: January 2008

recover xp product key from failed hardware (motherboard)

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer had a failed motherboard.

He has the XP CD, but cannot find the product key.

A search on the internet finds lots of ways to recover the key from a working system. But I had to dig a little deeper to find a way to recover the product key from a backup of the original system.

Its described at: XP Product Key Recovery

The initial description didn’t work for me, but a look at the troubleshooting section showed that I can load the %SystemRoot%System32configsoftware file, and then use regedit to get the correct string.

Its a bit of an awkward way to do this, but it works very well.

error 1327 and 1324 after a repair install of xp

Computer Aid Posted on by

A customer had a failed motherboard.

We decide to install a new mobo/CPU/RAM combination.

While backing up his data (onto my system), I notice that his drives have lots of partitions (120GB HDD has 5 partitions… some ntfs, some fat32… the 160Gb HDD has 7 NTFS partitions).

This looks like a leftover from the windows 98 days…

I use partition magic to merge everything into just 1 partition per drive.

I then place the HDDs into the customers PC, do a repair install of xp, but xp starts giving some odd errors:

error 1327 : invalid drive.

I’m then told to restore the my documents folder

A scan of the internet doesn’t show anything relevant.

I figure the my documents is pointing to a drive that no longer exists, so I do what I’m told:

right-click on my documents -> properties -> restore default.

Hey, its all working fine now (except office is not happy… I gather it was installed on another drive).

Looks like office will need to be reinstalled.