Two ways to retreive your Windows product key

20 Aug 2021

I have almost no reason to use Windows, but my laptop came with Windows 10 pre-installed on it. I thought retreiving my Windows product key might still be useful in the future, so here are two ways you can do it.

From Windows

Windows won't let you find your product key from the settings or from the control panel — well, at least I couldn't find it. Fortunately, there is a command you can type in an administrator command prompt (cmd or Powershell, ran as administrator).

wmic path softwarelicensingservice get OA3xOriginalProductKey

From Linux

You can get your Windows product key from a simple pseudo-file: /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM. Just use more, or cat, or whatever you want to read it's content.

sudo cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM

The file contains a bit more than the product key, but the product key is present. It is formatted as such: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX, at the end of the file.