I am trying to reactivate windows 7 home premium after fixing a compaq presario CQ62 by reinstalling windows to fix a boot loop. The CD key on the sticker on the bottom of the computer is worn off and unreadable so I extracted the key by removing the hard drive, connecting it to a working laptop, and using magical jelleybean keyfinder. This key will not successfully activate windows. From what I have found, this is because that key is the OEM key and must match with something in the bios but I'm not sure how to make it do this. All I did to this computer was place a clean install of windows 7 home premium on it, install updates and drivers. All of the original files are still in the windows.old folder.
Thanks, that workded pretty quickly. The factory restore wouldn't work at the time, as soon as the compaq spash screen ended it would reboot (before "starting windows" shows up) even when I attempted to get to the built in recovery (I wasn't even sure if the hard drive was working until I plugged it into my laptop) although I could probably use it now, the recovery partition is still there but I already got all the drivers installed and updated.