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#1
Need to get software licenses from HDD that won't boot up
Wasn't sure where else to post this thread.
I have a user workstation in my office, a Dell XPS, purchased August 2013, and unfortunately only had the 1 year warranty on it. The machine started exhibiting weird behavior the past few weeks, and then got to the point where it wouldn't boot up at all. I ran the Dell diagnostics on the system and it said the hard drive was bad, pretty much.
I ordered a new HDD to install in the machine, because it's all good otherwise and spec'd pretty well to be used as a production machine. The problem is I don't have the serial numbers handy for things like Office 2010, and some other software really should be removed before transferring it to another HDD (essentially a new machine).
Normally I run Belarc Advisor on an existing machine before doing any type of reformatting or HDD replacement, but I don't think that's possible in this case, since I can't actually get this HDD to boot up. I was going to put the HDD into another machine as a secondary drive to see if I could at least access files on it, but I read that Belarc Advisor can't be run on a secondary drive in that way, to get serial numbers off of it.
Do I have any other options here?