I made a mistake when uninstalling a windows 8 product key

[Ethan_1701]

I think i really messed up. I was trying to uninstall a product key from windows 8 and see if i could use that to activate my windows 10 computer. I'm not 100% sure if it would actually work, but I wanted to uninstall the product key and try. There's just one problem. I forgot to record the product key down somewhere, so now I have an unactivated window 8 laptop, and no product key, even though I uninstalled it on my computer.

So i guess what i'm asking here is do you know of any way to recover the product key?
I uninstalled it by following these steps, and it said 'product key uninstalled' but it never actually showed me the product key like it does in the last step. So then I tried to go into the control panel to see what my product key is, but when I tryed to go into control pannel to see what my key was, it said my copy of windows is unactivated (which was kind of what I was expecting

I would really appreciate it if you could help get the key back because I've gotten my self into quite the mess...
:/

 

[ss202sl]

There may be a sticker on the laptop with the key. Check the bottom of the laptop and the battery compartment

 

[SkyNetRising]

Was the laptop sold with windows 8 or you installed retail windows 8 on it?
If windows 8 was preinstalled, there may be windows key embedded into BIOS. But that also means it's OEM windows version and can not be transferred to another pc.

You can extract windows key from BIOS with rweverything utility.
https://itsolutionsblog.net/3-ways-to-extract-the-windows-8-product-key/

 

[Ethan_1701]

There may be a sticker on the laptop with the key. Check the bottom of the laptop and the battery compartment

Nope, not in the battery compartment, good idea though.
Thanks

 

[Ethan_1701]

Was the laptop sold with windows 8 or you installed retail windows 8 on it?
If windows 8 was preinstalled, there may be windows key embedded into BIOS. But that also means it's OEM windows version and can not be transferred to another pc.

You can extract windows key from BIOS with rweverything utility.
https://itsolutionsblog.net/3-ways-to-extract-the-windows-8-product-key/

Thanks, I kinda figured that I wouldn't be able to use the key to activate my windows 10 copy, but at least now I can activate my laptop

 

[SkyNetRising]

Well - there might be a way to do, what you intended in the first place.
1. You can upgrade your windows 8 laptop to windows 10 using accessibility upgrade (for assistive technology users);
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows10upgrade
2. You link upgraded windows 10 license to your microsoft account;
3. Then you can use activation troubleshooter on target pc to transfer windows license to it.

If you want to try it, you have to hurry. This free upgrade option ends on 2017.12.31.
https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-t...echnology-windows-10-upgrade-offer-in-a-week/

 

[Ethan_1701]

Well - there might be a way to do, what you intended in the first place.
1. You can upgrade your windows 8 laptop to windows 10 using accessibility upgrade (for assistive technology users);
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows10upgrade
2. You link upgraded windows 10 license to your microsoft account;
3. Then you can use activation troubleshooter on target pc to transfer windows license to it.

If you want to try it, you have to hurry. This free upgrade option ends on 2017.12.31.
https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-t...echnology-windows-10-upgrade-offer-in-a-week/

I got the product key back using one of the programs SkyNetRising recommended, and just out of curiosity tried to activate windows 10, and lucky me, it worked, without needing to do anything fancy like downgrade to windows 8 😀