Retrieve Visual Studio 2017 (Enterprise) Key from privateregistry
I have bought a new SSD and want to reinstall Windows 10 and Visual Studio Enterprise 2017. The problem is, I got an "On the Hub" Account as a Student, on which you can get Microsoft Products for free, but now it seems that my Account has been removed since I left school a while ago, but my Keys still work (VS and as well Windows 10).
I did retrieve my Windows 10 Key from registry but since VS 2017 doesn’t store Keys in registry but in the privateregistry.bin file, i can’t seem to find the Key itself. The closest I got is adding the hive file in Regedit and looking into it.
But in the Registration, as well in the Licences folder are no real Keys saved.
Is there a possibility to retrieve it from somewhere in the hive or maybe can i just copy the privateregistry.bin file and add it into the Appdata folder after formatting? I didn’t wanted to format before I’m sure, so I don’t lose my license.
Answer
You should be able to find the activation key under the registry path HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Licenses\5C505A59-E312-4B89-9508-E162F8150517\08860 . The value is encrypted though, so you need to decrypt it with the CryptUnprotectData method in the Win32 API.
I have created a small tool that simplifies this and should allow extracting product keys for Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019 (only tested for 2019 professional so far):