I have a laptop in front of me with a corrupt win7 install.

When it boots, it just gets stuck in startup repair for hours on end, reboots and does the same thing. Rinse and repeat forever.

I can access the HDD when I slave it to another machine, so I can pull off docs and photos etc.. but I can't do a reinstall because the COA sticker on the underside is worn, and I can't read the key. This is why I always cellotape over the COA stickers of my laptops.

If I have access to the drive (slaved), is there anyway to display the key?

I know magical jellybean only works on the OS drive of the host machine, but are there other ways to recover it?

How If one may enquire

My original plan was to slave the drive to another machine and run a key finder like this one

However, I was lucky. I slaved the drive and ran a error checker and let it attempt to fix the errors. When I put it back into the laptop, the system could see the recovery partition and everything went swimmingly after that.

Finished the recovery, listed the key and stuck it on a label on the underside of the laptop, just in case.

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I now have another one to sort, with similar problems - worn CoA sticker, unresponsive HDD and no disks.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Part of the chassis has been melted - with a lighter or soldering iron, not really sure, but it has a hole in it big enough to push a pen through. The keyboard is bent, and sunken in the middle - like someone has had a REALLY bad case of 'rage quit' and punched it square in the middle. Oh, and one of the memory slots is broken, presumably from the blow delivered to the keyboard.

Seriously, I may upload pics of this thing.

Other than that, it looks okay.