Full Recovery-Product key help

If anyone has done a full recovery (reformat and reinstall) on Windows ME, I need your help in letting me know which product key code it will ask for.

My problem is that I have two certificates of authenticity and have no clue which software they go to (any help on tracing back would be appreciated!) I also found a product key code on the side of my Hewlett-Packard PC. And when I open the My Computer properties, it shows my registered name and another code. All of these except the code on the PC includes the letters OEM in the second section.

Soooo - which of these will I need to enter after starting the recovery disk? (Hopefully not one of these that I that don't know which software they go to!)

Thanks for any advice!

 

The one you will need is here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ProductID

And then there's Magical Jelly Beans.

 

Earlier when I had looked in microsoft's website, there was instructions just like you said to find the key in the registry - but I thought it said that was only for windows 2000; windows me only had a seperate coa. Anyway, I tried looking in the registry and there was both the product key and the product id. I also tried the magical jelly beans download and it showed the same thing for product key. So thanks!

One thing I am left wondering now, however, is why the Windows product id number also shows up the same for media player. I had done an edit>find on the registry in hopes of tracing back these two unidentified coa's mentioned earlier - neither of which is in the registry (that I could find!).

But I guess I have what I need to do a clean install. Hope everything goes smoothly for me on this - in the past I have only done the reinstall without reformatting, but after five years, I think there is an accumulation of too much junk! Wish me luck!