One of my old client computer that is part of my WHS network at home failed. I managed to salvage parts from another computer and put together a temporary system. I tried to restore the latest client backup onto the temporary system but for some reason it cannot boot up (complains about BOOTMGR not found)... I even tried to repair the backed up system with a Windows 7 image but after fixing the BOOTMGR problem, it would BSOD during bootup (right around loading the classpnp.sys driver).
So instead of doing a restore, I will install a brand new Windows 7 on the temporary system and then retrieve all the backed up data from the old client manually. This is for our secondary PC so not much was installed on it so manual restore is not too time consuming.
But I have a question now. Because I'm unable to restore the Win7 install, I somehow need to retrieve the CD key from the client PC backup, because I've misplaced the original Win7 installation CD. So is there a program that can retrieve the CD key from the client PC backup on the WHS?
Thanks.