win7 activation after recovery discs installation.

Hi Guys,
Did a fix there recently on a HP pavilion. it suffered a hard drive failure and there was no recovery discs in situ. I purchased a replacement hd and purchased recovery discs from hp. So the build went fine and everything installed ok. Then it asked me for the product key. Now I have several win7 discs but the only reason I had purchased the recovery discs is because the key sticker had faded and was illegible.
So after spending 38 bucks on these discs I cant get past the activation issue.
I was able to read an xp key before in the OS but when i googled this procedure for win7 I ran into all kinds of key finding tools etc. I tried 4 but none of them worked, they gave me keys but activation rejected them as default keys.
Anyone have a quick fix to my longwinded issue???
Thanks guys, any assist would make life easier.
al

Welcome to Windows Seven Forums.

I'm sure if you contact HP and quote your serial number and product number they would be able to give you the product key for your computer.

Yes, call HP. If they were the correct recovery disks you shouldn't have been prompted for a product code at all. The product code should have been entered silently and windows activated automatically.

HP Recovery disks normally include the OEM_SLP Key - so that should have worked.

Two possible causes
1) teh BIOS has been updated with a non-SLIC-compliant version
2) The OS is slightly corrupted in some way, and can't self-activate the Key

To properly analyse and solve problems with Activation and Validation, we need to see a full copy of the report produced by the MGADiag tool (download and save to desktop - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=52012 )
Once saved, run the tool.
Click on the Continue button, which will produce the report.
To copy the report to your response, click on the Copy button in the tool (ignore any error messages at this point), and then paste (using either r-click/Paste, or Ctrl+V ) into your response.
- **in your own thread**, please

I'm guessing based on some comments you made ... but it looks like your HP originally had XP on it and the recovery disks you purchased were for Windows 7. In that case, even if you were able to read the product key on the PC, it would not work as it was for XP.

So, did you do something like an Anytime Upgrade to "upgrade" your HP from XP to Win7? If so, when you obtained the Anytime Upgrade, you would also have received an email with the new product key. If you can find that, it just might work with the recovery disks.