MS licensing question (yes another, sorry)...

smids · 19 Nov 2008 at 15:26

Right, you are probably thinking that this is just another thread... but mine is slightly different - I promise.

I own Vista Ultimate Retail. I do my fair bit of overclocking, so sometimes have to boot into windows with an unstable PC. This has sometimes broken my windows install, which is not always pleasant, given the time it takes to do a fresh install.

Soooo, I'm planning on setting up 2 partitions on my RAID0 array. The first will play host to my main O/S. What I want to do on the second partition is place a test O/S which I will boot from when running stability tests.

Summarily, I have the O/S on one 'machine' only, the same hard drive etc, but two different installs - one used only as a test environment (and is still quicker than imaging). I cannot run both at the same time, obviously.

So, any problems with this?

Thanks in advance!

smids.

csmager · 19 Nov 2008 at 15:43

Wouldn't have thought so. You're only running it on one pc at once, as you can't boot up both at the same time.

smids · 19 Nov 2008 at 20:50

Cool - might give this a bash sometime soon. I've partitioned the first 200GB of 600GB to ensure I'm using the fastest part of the drives for the main OS but have 397GB to find a use for and this seems to fit the bill.

Deleted member 77746 · 19 Nov 2008 at 21:15

Theres no problem with that setup regards to licensing but your probably better off buying ANOTHER hard drive, 80gb or something with an xp/vista image you can restore or something to do tests with otherwise what could happen is a unstable overclock could break the boot and render your raid system unbootable thus having to re-install your whole raid system again. Your playing with fire to be honest especially on a raid system and overclocking. A new single drive would be better to test overclocks with really I would have thought.

smids · 19 Nov 2008 at 21:53

optitech-uk said:
Theres no problem with that setup regards to licensing but your probably better off buying ANOTHER hard drive, 80gb or something with an xp/vista image you can restore or something to do tests with otherwise what could happen is a unstable overclock could break the boot and render your raid system unbootable thus having to re-install your whole raid system again. Your playing with fire to be honest especially on a raid system and overclocking. A new single drive would be better to test overclocks with really I would have thought.

To tell the truth, that is what I am doing now. I'm using a spare XP license that I have and this is on an 80GB drive which isn't even in my case. I power it through the external backplate which came with my motherboard. It literally is sitting on top of my case right now with just the cables plugged in. I only plug it in for testing but the problem is I run a 64 bit OS and sometimes you can be 32bit stable but 64bit unstable, once you really utilise the remainder of the CPU. Therein lies the problem... which is why I want to use this method.

Messing a bootloader is not really a problem and is easily fixed in recovery console (I've also kept a spare on a USB drive so it's easy enough to replace). I was wondering only really about the licensing side of things, which I thought was quite a novel use.