Moving a SQL Server DB Server

[SamBones]

Is there any way to extract the license key that a MS SQL Server instance was installed with? Would that be kept in the registry, or a config file somewhere?

What's happening, we have an instance that's been shut down for about six months. We'd like to reuse that license to bring up an instance on another machine. That instance we'd like to take the license from was installed before I was in this group, and nobody seems to know who installed SQL Server, so we have nobody to ask for the license. I was hoping there was some way to just pull it from the old server.

Just looking for something that looks like a license, I've found ProductCode and ProductID in the registry. I'm not sure what format the license is, so it's proving difficult to find a candidate.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[SamBones]

Neevrmind. I found this powershell command and it's working perfectly.

function GetSqlServerProductKey {
    ## function to retrieve the license key of a SQL 2008 Server.
    param ($targets = ".")
    $hklm = 2147483650
    $regPath = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Setup"
    $regValue1 = "DigitalProductId"
    $regValue2 = "PatchLevel"
    $regValue3 = "Edition"
    Foreach ($target in $targets) {
        $productKey = $null
        $win32os = $null
        $wmi = [WMIClass]"\\$target\root\default:stdRegProv"
        $data = $wmi.GetBinaryValue($hklm,$regPath,$regValue1)
        [string]$SQLver = $wmi.GetstringValue($hklm,$regPath,$regValue2).svalue
        [string]$SQLedition = $wmi.GetstringValue($hklm,$regPath,$regValue3).svalue
        $binArray = ($data.uValue)[52..66]
        $charsArray = "B","C","D","F","G","H","J","K","M","P","Q","R","T","V","W","X","Y","2","3","4","6","7","8","9"
        ## decrypt base24 encoded binary data
        For ($i = 24; $i -ge 0; $i--) {
            $k = 0
            For ($j = 14; $j -ge 0; $j--) {
                $k = $k * 256 -bxor $binArray[$j]
                $binArray[$j] = [math]::truncate($k / 24)
                $k = $k % 24
         }
            $productKey = $charsArray[$k] + $productKey
            If (($i % 5 -eq 0) -and ($i -ne 0)) {
                $productKey = "-" + $productKey
            }
        }
        $win32os = Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem -computer $target
        $obj = New-Object Object
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty Computer -value $target
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty OSCaption -value $win32os.Caption
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty OSArch -value $win32os.OSArchitecture
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty SQLver -value $SQLver
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty SQLedition -value $SQLedition
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty ProductKey -value $productkey
        $obj
    }
}

It was found here:

http://www.ryadel.com/en/sql-server-retrieve-product-key-from-an-existing-installation/