OK, we’ve all been in this position. Either Windows or another program you’re using has become corrupt and you need to reinstall but you can’t find the packaging or card with the product key to reinstall. You’re either a victim of your own ‘controlled anarchy’ that you call your living space or you’re just very good at putting stuff in a ‘safe’ place so that you don’t accidentally throw it out. Although, not perfect, there’s a good program that’s been around for a while that has been doing a very good job of finding product keys and it goes by the unusual name of Magical Jellybean finder. It’s a mere 331 kB in size and requires no installation and best of all it’s FREE. All you have to do is unzip the file and run the keyfinder.exe file. Here’s a screenshot of the program in action.

Magical Jellybean Screenshot

Another great thing about this utility is that you can even recover keys from a hard drive that no longer boots into the operating system as long as the hive (where the passwords are stored) is undamaged. You’ll need to transfer the damaged drive to a working system and then install Magical Jellybean on the working system. From the ‘Tools’ menu, select ‘Load Hive’ and point it to the dead Windows install. You can then save or print the file.

Here’s the link to the homepage for Magical Jellybean Keyfinder:
http://www.magicaljellybean.com/

And here’s a partial list of software that the program is able to search out product keys for:

MICROSOFT
Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008
Microsoft Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007

GAMES:
Battlefield 1942 / Road to Rome / Secret Weapons / Vietnam
Black and White
Call Of Duty 2
Command and Conquer / Generals / Generals Zero Hour / Red Alert / Red Alert 2 / Tiberian Sun/ Tiberium Wars
Company of Heroes
Counter Strike (Retail)
Crysis
Half Life
Splinter Cell

OTHER NOTEABLE SOFTWARE
Adobe Acrobat 6/7/8
AutoCAD 200/2002/2004