How can I change/generate my ProductID, DigitalProductID without reins

[Lunac]

Hello.

I was wondering if this was doable. I have several OEM Win98SE COA Booklets with OEM CD keys. I know you can change the registry "ProductKey" easily. But "DigitalProductID", and "ProductID" stay the same. It seems they are generated only once at setup time by PIDGEN.DLL and are based on the "ProductKey". Can they be generated again manually without re-installing Win98SE? Also, there are a lot of registry keys and their values that are undocumented, such as "ProductType" and "InstallType". Anyone know their purpose?

Anyone any ideas?

[LLXX]

From a little searching of the Internet, it seems that deleting DigitalProductID will result in it being generated again from the ProductKey; the product key is actually a base-24 integer, and DigitalProductID contains the multi-byte integer representation of it, among other things such as ProductID.

ProductID has fixed part and dynamic part, eg.

aaaaa-bbb-ccccccc-ccccc

The aaaaa will always be 50578 for 98se, bbb is the install type:

000 : Other (includes some retail, upgrade and evaluation versions)

011 : Upgrade

OEM : OEM

270 : Volume License

335 : Retail

640 : Volume License

The c part is dynamic and depends on the product key.

[Lunac]

LLXX, it didn't work. First I deleted the DigitalProductID, rebooted and nothing. So, I deleted ProductID as well. Nothing again. Any idea?

On Edit: I did add the new OEM cd key. Maybe there is something else that triggers the pidgen.dll? BootCount key maybe?

Edited January 6, 2006 by Lunac

[Lunac]

LLXX, I want to add. I just had some people who have Win98SE check their ProductIDs. The "aaaaa" part is NOT always 50578.

Here are some others:

31300-OEM-xxxxxxx-xxxxx

50807-019-xxxxxxx-xxxxx

12000-OEM-xxxxxxx-xxxxx

[LLXX]

So it seems to not care if ProductID and DigitalProductID are present or not? Then I guess you could write whatever values you wanted in them... what does it show for a product ID in the system properties page then?

31300 and 12000 are OEM releases by specific manufacturers. It'd be much more informative to provide the description of the Win98se distro those pids were found on.

50807-019 looks like a special distribution version (beta? pre-test?)

[kartel]

ProductID 10005-OEM-"0087999-00000"

whats mine ?

[Lunac]

LLXX, mine is an OEM as well. I contacted some family members and friends that were either using or dual booting with Win98SE. I got more PIDs:

17702-OEM-xxxxxxx-xxxxx

04004-OEM-xxxxxxx-xxxxx

50228-029-xxxxxxx-xxxxx

Sure, I could write anything. Heck, the computer boots without PID, DPID, or ProdKey. (Which leads me to believe that actual values are not in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\" but somewhere else, encoded or encrypted.) But that's not the point. I need a valid PID and DPID, generated by pidgen.dll. As my question indicated. I already know I can generate new values if I re-install the OS. Trick here is how do I get Windows to generate new ones without reinstalling.

Edited January 6, 2006 by Lunac

[kartel]

check this out, seems theres a IE product key

key finder click here

Edited January 7, 2006 by kartel

[LLXX]

There is an executable calld PIDSET.EXE which appears to do something with the DigitalProductID key in the registry; the following strings of interest are found in it:

SystemBiosVersion SystemBiosDate HARDWARE\DESCRIPTION\System C:\ \\.\vwin32 \\.\%c: \Device %c: VideoBiosVersion VideoBiosDate DigitalProductId SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion

[Lunac]

I found no documentation on this matter. Apparently the only way to generate a pid is to enter Win98SE setup (install/re-install). I think there might be a way to get Win98SE setup to generate pid without doing a complete install (and in process screwing-up the registry).