I am working on my friends Dell and it has a dead hard drive. The product key is rubbed off the COA sticker. He has no recovery disks that came from dell and he has no home made recovery disks made from the computer. I know the BIOS is locked to a product key for a particular copy of windows. Is there a way to extract the key from the BIOS? Or a way to find out which version of Windows was installed? Will any Dell windows cd work?
Model number? I'm assuming you can access the BIOS, still first thing I'd do is remove the HHD from the computer and hook it up to a different computer and see if that computer sees it. I've seen more than one "dead hard drive" be a failed power supply, dead faulted battery and etc.
We are talking about Windows 7 here, there is no key in BIOS (only 8 and up use MSDM table). If the device came pre-installed with 7 there's a good chance it has an OEM SLP 2.1 SLIC table in BIOS. In this case you'd only need to reinstall Windows 7 (every edition except Enterprise) and then insert the certificate and OEM:SLP key with Daz' Windows Loader. Heck, even if there is no SLIC in BIOS, use the Loader anyway and call it a day. Note that if the actual Loader part has to be installed the new HDD needs to use the MBR partition style.
It is an Optiplex 990. I already hooked up the hdd to my computer and it finds nothing at all. completely DOA. Drive does not even spin. Yes, I can get into the BIOS.
New drive time and then new OS installation. You can get the OS via a link provided by this forum and use one of the suggested activation methods. Dell is pretty good about supplying drivers; download from their website.
Install whatever windows 7 version you want and activate with Daz loader, it should insert correct certificate and key, no big deal at all.
I Googled this model, it comes with Windows 7 Professional 64 bit. An OEM Win 7 DVD and new drive should get you going. No need for for the marvelous DAZ loader. (But that's no reason not to have it on hand!)