Reply #9: Okay ... [View All]

[RoyGBiv]

I think I'm starting to get the picture now, or at least I understand the reason he'd be installing the same OS two times.

So, I'm assuming now the license he's going to be using for the second drive is the same license he used for the install of the first drive. Is that correct?

If so, then technically he doesn't need a new license. Now that I think about it, I remember that I actually had Windoze installed on two different drives in the same system at one point, and the automatic activation worked fine. In my case, I was adding a new hard drive and wanted one of its partitions to serve as the system drive because it was so much faster than the old one and, well, new. But, I didn't want to replace the configuration I knew worked until I was sure my new install worked as I wanted it to. I actually still have that drive in my system and had forgotten Windoze was there.

Anyway, depending on several factors, activating Windoze on the second drive may be a problem, or at least annoying. This is due to Windoze activation requirement. As you apparently know, it's no longer good enough to have a license key. You have to activate it too. If he owns the license key outright and it did not come from a major assembler of computers such as Dell, Gateway, etc. and if he hasn't done any other major hardware modifications and/or activated that license in the last, I think, six months, it should install just fine. If any of those elements are in play, he may have to call the Microsoft number the system gives you during activation to get a key that will work.

Now, having said that, what I would do if I were installing the OS on the same machine a second time and had to call for a manual authorization would be to tell them simply that I installed a new drive and needed to reinstall Windoze. I would never mention anything about installing it twice on the same machine because that will inspire a lengthy round of completely pointless questioning. Other than the addition of that drive, not enough hardware should have changed to dramatically alter the profile for that license (this is checked, and there's a complicated formula for it that dictates whether MS considers the installation target a new machine) so they should have no issues with this answer.

I've installed my current copy of Windoze about ten times now, all completely legally, but I had to jump through a few hoops to get it done the first few times. I finally figured out just to tell them what they want to hear and offer no information other than direct and short responses to their questions. "Why are you installing Windoze today?" (This is an idiotic question, imo, but they usually start with that.) Any answer along the lines of "new hard drive" or "new motherboard and processor," etc. seems to satisfy them.