Vista Activation and resizing/moving partitions

T

Tom

Question regarding Vista (and even XP) activation - If I install Vista
in a separate primary partition how does activation work if I end up
moving or resizing that partition? In other words, let's say I have a
100GB HD, and I put XP in a 50GB partition and Vista in another 50GB
partition. I activate Vista. Then, later on, I have little need of the
XP partition and I decide to either get rid of it, or resize it down
dramatically. So I end up using BootIt NG's partition manager to resize
and move the XP partition down from 50GB to 20GB. Then I resize
(expand) the Vista partition from 50GB to 80GB. Now, will doing that
'trigger' Microsoft's stupid activation, both in Vista and in XP? Or
does it not care about partition but rather real hardware?

Thanks...

Tom
--
 
J

JimR

Tom said:
Question regarding Vista (and even XP) activation - If I install Vista
in a separate primary partition how does activation work if I end up
moving or resizing that partition? In other words, let's say I have a
100GB HD, and I put XP in a 50GB partition and Vista in another 50GB
partition. I activate Vista. Then, later on, I have little need of the
XP partition and I decide to either get rid of it, or resize it down
dramatically. So I end up using BootIt NG's partition manager to resize
and move the XP partition down from 50GB to 20GB. Then I resize
(expand) the Vista partition from 50GB to 80GB. Now, will doing that
'trigger' Microsoft's stupid activation, both in Vista and in XP? Or
does it not care about partition but rather real hardware?

Thanks...

Tom

Partition sizing or resizing has no effect on activation.
 
B

Beck

JimR said:
Partition sizing or resizing has no effect on activation.

Have you tried it?
In the oem eula it states it regards a device as a partition and that Vista
is locked to that device.
Has anyone actually tried resizing an oem locked partition to see if it
messes up the activation?
 
J

JimR

Beck said:
Have you tried it?
In the oem eula it states it regards a device as a partition and that
Vista is locked to that device.
Has anyone actually tried resizing an oem locked partition to see if it
messes up the activation?

I have reinstalled on the same computer on a 40gb partition, on an 80gb
partition, on a 45gb partition RAID0, and back to an 80gb single partition
standard sata. This is with a retail Vista copy not OEM but I didn't see the
OP mention OEM. I think the part of the EULA you are referring to means that
you can have only one instance of Vista per license on one computer.
 
B

Beck

I have reinstalled on the same computer on a 40gb partition, on an 80gb
partition, on a 45gb partition RAID0, and back to an 80gb single partition
standard sata. This is with a retail Vista copy not OEM but I didn't see
the OP mention OEM. I think the part of the EULA you are referring to
means that you can have only one instance of Vista per license on one
computer.

And no prompt for reactivation?
 
R

Rock

Tom said:
Question regarding Vista (and even XP) activation - If I install Vista
in a separate primary partition how does activation work if I end up
moving or resizing that partition? In other words, let's say I have a
100GB HD, and I put XP in a 50GB partition and Vista in another 50GB
partition. I activate Vista. Then, later on, I have little need of the
XP partition and I decide to either get rid of it, or resize it down
dramatically. So I end up using BootIt NG's partition manager to resize
and move the XP partition down from 50GB to 20GB. Then I resize
(expand) the Vista partition from 50GB to 80GB. Now, will doing that
'trigger' Microsoft's stupid activation, both in Vista and in XP? Or
does it not care about partition but rather real hardware?

Why worry about it? If something triggers activation, then reactivate. I
would not think, though, that resizing partitions will trigger it.
Activation in Vista is a new process from XP. We don't have the hard info
yet that there is for the WPA in XP. I have resized the Vista boot
partition (the one with the Vista windows files) in a multi-boot setup using
Vista's diskpart from the command line in the Ultimate retail version, with
no effect on activation.
 

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