So I’m trying to dig my Windows product key out of my recovered files. I run this pattern on all of them with ‘egrep -r ‘^([A-Za-z0-9]{5}-){4}[A-Za-z0-9]{5}$’ *’

It says it finds it in three files:

Binary file recup_dir.7567/f2079240352_unregmp2 matches
Binary file recup_dir.7574/f2082184960_pidgen_dll matches
Binary file recup_dir.7576/f2082580864_pidgen_dll matches

But when I go into vi to search for the string itself with the same regex, I get “No pattern matches.” Is the syntax for regex different in vi than in bash?

[Wednesday update]

I still haven’t found it, but amazingly, I seem to have installed a working version of Windows 10 without it.