How to find your Windows 10 Product Key using command prompt.

I recently came across a strange issue with a customer who was unable to find the Window Product Keys for some of the systems they had in the office. "No worries", I said. "We can get that information directly from Windows itself"... Or so I thought!!

I tend to use one of following trusted methods to find product keys for any Windows 10 system — I'm a command-line kind of guy — GUI's are not for me :-)

    1. via Command Prompt (with elevated priviledges):
      C:\> wmic path SoftwareLicensingService get OA3xOriginalProductKey
    2. via PowerShell:
      PS C:\> (Get-WmiObject -query 'select * from SoftwareLicensingService').OA3xOriginalProductKey

All went well with the exception of 10 systems the company had acquired via acquisitions, as neither of the above commands returned any output, not even an error message.

After a little digging about, it turned out that these systems were activated with digital licenses — That solved one mystery. (there's loads of information out there which explains about digital licenses so I won't cover it here).

Dilemma #2 ‐ On some of the systems I have access to I'm still puzzled. Whilst these sytems are all activated using digital certificates, some return the Windows Product Key and some don't — The solution it transpires, is that some of these systems have the Product Keys hard-coded in the BIOS, so will return that key...

Eureka, problem solved!