Lost CD Case Woes

[Deaf_Hobbit]

I have a potentially large problem looming on the horizon. A few months after i originally bought Civ 4, i lost the Cd case and CD while on a trip. Ever since them, i have been playing the game using a cd image and a disk hider program, which has been working fine for me. However, with a new laptop only a few days away from delivery, and a growing need to reformat my main desktop's hard drive, this could become a problem. Without the CD key on the case i will, obviously, be unable to reinstall the program. I know that i could just go to some website and find a generated CD key, but as i do occasionally play online, i would not like to deny the person who rightfully purchased that cd key that ability. I also could just transfer the whole program to my external HD and put it on both machines from there, but that would be very cumbersome and annoying.

What i would like to know is if there is any way to extract the CD key from the copy of civ 4 i already have installed? Is it in a file, or is there some program i could use to find it? Baring that, is there any other way i could recover a CD key without just stealing one online?

Thanks a lot for any help, and to anyone who thinks im trying to scam you all, i ask this question. I have the program installed on my computer (if i didnt, i would have no reason to have asked you these questions), which means that if i never owned a physical copy of the game with a key, i must have installed it by finding a key online. If that were the case, why wouldn't i just do that again, instead of going through the much more difficult process of trying to find my old one?

 

[MrCynical]

As far as I know, no version of Civ 4 uses a CD key. The European and American versions certainly don't, and I've not heard of any version that does. The game relies on having the original CD/DVD in the drive as an anti piracy measure, not a CD key. It shouldn't actually work if you're running from a CD image, and I'm surprised patch 1.61 hasn't caused you to run foul of the no features or 10 turn anti-piracy measrures.

If you don't have the original CD it shouldn't be possible to transfer the game (and I'm surprised it still works at all). As you probably know, this site has a zero tolerance policy on piracy, and I don't think there's a legal way to get round your problem without getting another copy of the game.