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I need to find out if a deployment of Windows 7 to a network was done with OEM, Retail, Volume or VL (VLK) media.

I need to know which product was used in case it is what is causing some licensing problems that I'm experiencing.

Where does this information exist in the registry?

Pro Backup
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Kieran Walsh
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3 Answers3

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I've managed to find the location. It's in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Setup\PID
  • 270 means Volume Licence media was used for install
  • OEM means OEM Media was used for install
  • 296 means MSDN media was used for install
  • 335 means Retail media was used for install

There are others I believe, but those four should be the most common.

Shane Madden
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Kieran Walsh
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  • Wow, excellent find! Make sure to accept your own answer. Where did you find that information? – Wesley Aug 19 '11 at 02:42
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    Thanks - have to wait two days before I can accept my own answer. I got the information from this site http://wiki.lunarsoft.net/wiki/Product_IDs – Kieran Walsh Aug 19 '11 at 06:34
  • Yeah, good find. – Safado Aug 19 '11 at 14:07
  • After some research, I'm not so sure you have the right registry key. Try: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProductId – Wesley Aug 19 '11 at 19:42
  • Hmm, no Wesley, that key doesn't exist on the systems that I've looked at. Interesting that you're finding different results. – Kieran Walsh Aug 20 '11 at 22:09
  • @Kieran Very interesting indeed. The key in your answer exists, but doesn't have a three digit number in. Doesn't seem to be the PID for me. – Wesley Aug 21 '11 at 06:02
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    On some OSes it has a longer key - but then just look at the last 3 digits. I didn't put that in my answer as Windows 7 only shows the 3 digits (in the machines I looked at least) – Kieran Walsh Aug 22 '11 at 23:34
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    This is only relevant to how that copy of Windows is *licensed*; as I said in my other answer, this has no relevance to the actual media used to install it. – Massimo Feb 20 '14 at 18:55
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You can use a free program called Keyfinder by Magic Jellybean on one of the working computers. This will grab the licensed used to activate it. You can then look at that license and see whether it's OEM, retail, Volume, etc..

It'll also grab other licenses for Windows products, like Office. It's a nice little program.

Safado
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  • Thanks for the tip, but these machines are not activated yet - they are still in their "grace period" of 30 days. Wouldn't that program just show me a serial number though and I'll not be able to figure out the version from that? – Kieran Walsh Aug 18 '11 at 22:33
  • Ah, gotchya. Well the idea is that you have your licenses documented, so you look up the license number and see to what type of installation it belongs. We're the same way here where we have a mix of OEM, Retail and VL and if we ever find a computer that doesn't have the license recorded in our inventory, that's how we figure it out. In your case, though, it doesn't look like that'll help :) – Safado Aug 19 '11 at 14:05
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The setup files are actually always the same, the licensing only depends on the product key. Some media come pre-configured with an appropriate key (most notably, volume-licensed ones default to the KMS client key for their edition), but any key can be used with any media.

This is instead not true for Office: a retail media will not accept an enterprise product key, and vice-versa.

Massimo
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