Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs Forum

Hello,

I recently upgraded a PC for a friend of mine by installing a brand new blank hard drive and 4GB of RAM. I installed a fresh Retail build of Windows 7, and have begun to reinstall all of the programs and data that the user had on the previous hard drive. He likes MS Office and WordPerfect, so, after performing the office install, we moved on to the WordPerfect install. Herein lies the problem. Although he had the install discs for WordPerfect, he did not have the insert that contained the serial number.

We did move the previous hard drive that used to be the primary boot drive and it is now in use as a slave drive. Most of the data on the drive has been moved to the new larger "C" drive.

Is there a way to scan the registry files on the drive that contains the old XP operating system to obatin the key for his WordPerfect build? Is there a way that he can contact the publisher and prove that he has a legitimate purchase of WordPerfect to obtain his serial number? I am not familar with version numbers, but, I am thinking this is version 10 or thereabouts, and all he is missing is the card that contains the serial number, which is probably exactly what he would need to prove that his copy is genuine.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

You can use a keyfinder program like LicenseCrawler or SoftKeyRevealer to scan the system (registry) for product keys. There are many other keyfinder programs available, but I do believe the two I recommended will find WordPerfect keys. Since these programs will normally only scan the registry on the boot drive, to scan the registry on a secondary or slave drive you can temporarily load the hive into the booted system registry before scanning.


You can definitely contact the publisher (Corel). If you do, let me know what they tell you.


Your friend could also purchase another copy of WordPerfect 10 or even the latest WordPerfect Office X5 for a relatively low price.

Let me know what the final solution turns out to be. Scott.