I accidentally disconnected my hard drive while it was still running and corrupted my Windows 7 installation; I am now completely unable to boot into Windows. I have tried everything to try and repair the installation: Windows Startup Repair, chkdsk /r, SFC /scannow, bootrec /rebuildbcd, etc. and no luck. I want to just perform a fresh install, but my problem is that I do not have my Windows product key written down anywhere, and I am unable to use any scripts or utilities to retrieve it from the registry because I cannot boot into Windows.
Windows 7 product keys are stored, encrypted, in the "DigitalProductId" value of the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion. I was able to mount the corrupted Windows partition read-only from an Ubuntu live CD and copy the Windows\System32\config\SOFTWARE registry hive, which contains the key & value in question, to a flash drive, but loading this hive into regedit on a working Windows installation and then trying to use scripts or utilities to decrypt the loaded "DigitalProductId" value only returns the product key of the host Windows installation, no matter how much fiddling I try. I've tried contacting Microsoft support and they've been rather unhelpful. Would anyone be able to guide me further? Perhaps if there's a different way to retrieve the product key from Linux?
If someone more familiar with scripting/cryptography would be willing to try and follow the decryption script to decrypt the product key by hand, I could e-mail you the exported "DigitalProductId" value, SOFTWARE registry hive, and decryption script.
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