Removable harddrive computer.

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Guest

I want to build a computer that has a removable drawer so I can swap out boot
drives, maybe 3 or 4 of them. No other hardware will change. Will this work?
Can I get by with 1 license for 1 computer?
 
Why removable? Today's BIOS's usually allow for you to change the boot order
and select which hard drive to boot from.

The XP EULA says one install per XP CD. I'm not sure about the swapping of
drives - might want to re-read the EULA.
 
Yes, although some of these drive-caddies are not too reliable. Most of the
IDE ones won't work relaibly at ATA100/133, you have to set the speed down to
66 or less. I believe the SATA ones are a little more reliable, having less
connections to go wrong!

At the moment I use IDE caddies for testing software on various OS's, but
I'm building a machine with Virtual PC to see if that's a more efficient
route. One advantage is that you can run two virtual machines at once,
avoiding the delays in shutting-down, rebooting, loading the software, etc.

You can use the same licence so long as you 'image' the disks. (If you tried
to install four times you'd have to activate four times which isn't allowed)

Using multiple partitions (or BIOS boot-order selection) is only viable is
there is no virus/malware risk, since there is no physical security between
the partitions.
 
John said:
I want to build a computer that has a removable drawer so I can swap out boot
drives, maybe 3 or 4 of them. No other hardware will change. Will this work?
Can I get by with 1 license for 1 computer?
Click to expand...

I am unsure of the details of your intentions here, thus the answer is
"maybe"... for a while. providing you image the OS.

I solve my boot issue with PRIMARY partitions on the HDD-0 drive. The
second partition is an image of the first, however one has to
understand that boot.ini is always read from Partition-1.

Now here is where I use the swappable caddy...
I often service other peoples hard drives to recover data or to scan
them for virus / adware. etc. For this activity I use the IDE caddy.
With an adapter, I can even put a smaller laptop hard drive in it.

The problem comes with Windows XP and "changing hardware". After I swap
in and out various hard drives several times, XP makes me re-activate.
It works, but is one royal pain. My understanding of what is allowed to
be changed puzzles me why this happens, but it has been consistent. I
have re-activated XP three times now.

That was over a year ago. To work around the hassle, I added another
bootable partition. On it, I installed Windows 2000. When I need to
scan a hard drive, I boot into Windows 2000 to do the scanning or data
recovery work.

There are also some recovery tools available that are a bootable linix
CD and a data recovery program.
 
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