This week really sucks.

If you call them and explain, they should help. I've had to do that more than once.

@QueenMorgana
Their customer support really sucks, but I'll do that.
Better than staring at it bitterly all dayn Thanks :)

Day*

@ThatDude
Yeah.. I'm an idiot haha.

@ThatDude
I scratched it with my finger. When I realized what I did, I so stupidly thought scratching it more would help. Nope, I worsened it.

@Michelle they can tell if it's been used or not. Having worked customer IT, I called them regularly... You're not alone in this. And at least you didn't use a knife like some users...

@Michelle brute force it

Produkey if it is still running

oh damn, thats just bad luck i guess (or stupidity)

@QueenMorgana
A knife?! At least I had some sense...

Rip. I'm too scared to call them because of Social Anxiety. I'll deal with it. It's not like it was important anyway :)

@ThatDude
An online friend just talked to me and forced me to call them and I did.
I'm on hold right now and I think I'm about to cry omg. I need to get over this fear.
At least it's almost done. I gave them permission to control my laptop so that we don't have to talk too much.

@ThatDude
I'm sure he wasn't a scammer. He tried his best, but it turns out he couldn't help. Rip.

@ThatDude
They gave me a case number, but I have no idea what to do with it lol.

Start a community project, asking people to compile database of old Windows Product keys. That way, if people are not using it anymore, others can circumvent this problem.

What version do you need? I might have some legible stickers on old PCs that only run Linux or that are out of commission.

Nice.Atleast you had a product key sticker right there..I didnot even get that..and I am basically screwed..getting help though...

@NazgUruk hp mate?

@hereiskkb nope Lenovo...

I don’t get it

What happened??

@Michelle
There's four symbols missing?
Okay let's see.. there's roughly 1.6m possibilities(A-Z, 0-9), right? How fast can you test them? If it takes 1s to test, then that's 2.7 weeks to crack the key, that sounds reasonable 😤

So following that logic, the time it takes to crack(in weeks) will be '2.7 * X', where X is the number of seconds it takes to test one key.

Jfyi: 

The Raw Product Key is buried inside the Product Key that is printed on the sticker distributed with each Windows XP CD. It consists of five alphanumeric strings separated by '-' characters, where each string is composed of five characters, as in  

                   FFFFF-GGGGG-HHHHH-JJJJJ-KKKKK 

Each character is one of the following 24 letters and digits: 

B C D F G H J K M P Q R T V W X Y 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 

Very similar to the decimal encoding of the Installation ID the 25 characters of the Product Key form a base-24 encoding of the binary representation of the Product Key. Decoding the Product Key yields a multi-precision integer of roughly 115 bits, which is stored – again in little endian byte order - in an array of 15 bytes. Decoding the above Product Key results in the following byte sequence. 
0x6F 0xFA 0x95 0x45 0xFC 0x75 0xB5 0x52 0xBB 0xEF 0xB1 0x17 0xDA 0xCD 0x00 

Of these 15 bytes the least significant four bytes contain the Raw Product Key in little endian byte order. The least significant bit is removed by shifting this 32-bit value (0x4595FA6F - remember the little endian byte order) to the let by one bit position, resulting in a Raw Product Key of 0x22CAFD37, or 

                             583728439 

in decimal notation.  

The eleven remaining bytes form a digital signature, allowing verification of the authenticity of the Product Key by means of a hard-coded public key. 

Note: this might have changed over the years, the research on this is based on windows XP but the chars used in let's still is the same.

There's software to read the licence from the running machine if that's possible.

This is why I take pictures of these.

You can grab the product key from the registry if you can start the machine :)

@dsteiner
That's some thorough research! Maybe we could use this information to help @Michelle crack the key? Knowing this really cuts down the amount of time it would take to brute force it.

@coolq well in fact i am pretty sure that I could spin up a keygen that can validate the key if I had the other 4 parts of the key and that info. that isn't that much work.

@dsteiner mate, you're awesome 👍

Also! Find the program proju-key. It’s how I’ve found mine in the past.

@codepotato
I scratched off my product key so I can't activate windows.

@dsteiner
Wow, thank you! This will surely help greatly. I appreciate it!

@kenogo
It's a product key. It activates windows.

@kenogo
I'm not sure... Perhaps scratching it gently with a coin?

@epsylon76 or even if it isn't running produkey can help if the windows\system32\config directory is still there (another computer can run produkey on those files).

Small update: I've spun up a Programm that randomly generates partial keys based on the given alphabet with the given length - this is similar to most password generators found on the web but with the difference that I loop trough all possibilities starting with aaaa and then increasing the least significant one aaab aaac and so on. The problem with this is that 4 missing characters in a windows product key would mean 281 474 976 710 656 combinations - I haven't sorted out "all same" cases like AAAA (those are highly unlikely) but even if I remove those the amount of permutations is still huge.

@dsteiner it all comes down to how fast you can check them. Why are there so many combinations?

@coolq 4^24

@dsteiner Ah of course!

@dsteiner

4^24? Why is that?

Maybe I'm missing something, but shouldn't it be l(ength)^c(hars)? In that case, wouldn't it be 5^36?

@Cyanite yes but the last char in that part is a 2 (barely readable) and the possible characters are 24 (as listed above)

@dsteiner

Ah, see, I knew I was missing something.

I'm going to brute force it. Apparently vowels aren't allowed, so it makes things a bit easier.

@Michelle I already posted a list with valid characters

Oh wait, nevermind. I see it. Thank you!!

@Michelle
Good, I was hoping you'd try that, do you know Python? Or another good language to automatically your keys? That would make it much faster to test

@coolq
I do. I got tired and gave up haha. I'll try to create a python program tomorrow that will generate the key.

@Michelle
Alright 👍

I guess someone's about to be a die hard linux user.

@codePatrol
I've always been a Linux fan.

@SHA-16384
Sharp eyes! Hope @Michelle tries this!

@SHA-16384
Thanks, but I already cracked it 3 days ago. :)