Recover 10 key from corrupted hard drive

My aunt upgraded her 5 year old Win 7 desktop to Win 10. The PC ran well until this morning when she got errors upon boot (Preparing automatic repair, diagnosing your PC) After we tried and failed to get anything in the troubleshooter to 'repair' it (even the reset that would save personal files failed) I pulled the drive from her PC and am using a USB to SATA adapter to manually copy what I can to my Win 7 Pro machine. (saving pictures, documents, etc)

Some files (less than 1%) won't copy due to various read errors, but I am getting most copied over. Is there a way to recover the product key from the files on the system so when I re-install 10 on a new drive for her PC, I can activate it with the key she had on the old drive? Thanks in advance.

cereberus said:

You do not need a key - simply reinstall and skip key entry. Windows 10 upgrade licences are tied to mobo id and MS have record of it from original upgrade. It will activate automatically.

Welcome to TenForums @YaSo

I've actually done this. The laptop I'm using now was once a Win7 PC and I upgraded to 10 from the launch. Before upgrading to the Anniversary Update I wanted first to do a test run to check all the new drivers would work. I took out my original drive, put a blank one in its place and did a clean install, skipping entering the key. It activated within minutes.

The Hard Drive is specifically excluded from the hardware ID check so that people like your Aunt can repair their PCs when the drives fail.