A while ago, I bought a new laptop, a Toshiba. Before I turned it on, I swapped out the hard drive and installed openSUSE. I have this drive that has an unreigstered license for Windows 8 on it. I have absolutely no intention of ever using Windows on this laptop. I was considering though, installing the drive in my desktop and dual booting Windows 8 / openSUSE.
Before I trashed the pristine drive though, I though I’d ask if anyone knows if the version of Windows that is factory installed on this drive is different from any other because it came on a Toshiba machine. I mean, would it contain all the drivers for all machines or would it contain only those necessary for the exact machine it came in.
I thought I’d just disconnect all the hard drives presently in this machine, and plug in the laptop drive in the #1 SATA port, turn the machine on, and let it do it’s thing.
Then, if and when Windows gets up and running, I could just reconnect the current drives, run supergrub to boot from the openSUSE drive, run grub2-install and everything should just work.
Can anyone confirm this would work?
Does anyone have any better idea? (mkfs on the Windows drive doesn’t count;))
Is there anything I could do while in this process that would be of help? Like any tests or anything?
Your computer probably came with an OEM version of Windows, which is tied to the kind of hardware that is typically used on that kind of computer. So you might run into problems.
Also some vendors are putting the Windows license key (or equiv) in the hardware (ROM) for Windows 8 machines.
This disk has never been run. I bought the laptop new, opened the box and swapped the drive without ever turning it on. The operating system resides in the hidden partition that is used for installation. At least that’s my impression. nrickert may be right though, Toshibe may customize the version to include only Tosh drivers. I don’t know, maybe I’ll just try it anyway. If it trashes the disk, it’ll trash something I’ll never use anyway.
You guys misunderstand how the Windows customization works - the Win8 included on machines does not “remove” the default 8.x drivers that are included but instead have a specific OEM directory where additional drivers that are provided by the company are included in.
So you can move the installation before it is activated but you will need a serial key for it - for OEM versions it’s usually included in the BIOS of the machine and/or combination of it and a serial.
AHAH! So moving the drive from one machine to another will not work. Unless I have a key, which I don’t remember seeing. Wonder if I can poke around in the bios and find it.
I assume the old 8 trick has been removed.
Have to admit, I’m losing interest. A lot of fussing around for extremely small return. I haven’t had a need for Windows for eight or nine years now. Don’t anticipate that changing anytime soon.
The good thing about OEM windows though is that if you completely trash it you can contact the vendor support and once they confirm you indeed have the laptop you claim and bought it legaly they should send you a fresh copy by some means (this works with Dell at least). You might want to consult your Toshiba support if they have the same policy.
>
> jetchisel;2691193 Wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Even on older windows versions you cant just swap the disk on different
>> machines. It will lock you out.
>
> This disk has never been run. I bought the laptop new, opened the box
> and swapped the drive without ever turning it on. The operating system
> resides in the hidden partition that is used for installation. At least
> that’s my impression. nrickert may be right though, Toshibe may
> customize the version to include only Tosh drivers. I don’t know, maybe
> I’ll just try it anyway. If it trashes the disk, it’ll trash something
> I’ll never use anyway.
>
Way back when, I tried that with an HP box. The installation/initialization
fell over immediately with a message about the machine I was trying to run
was NOT the one that this version of Windows was licensed for. Must have
been a hardware version check built into the OEM customization somewhere,
but that was enough to end any further monkeying around.
Use clonezilla or something to make a backup of the pristine disk so if you try something and the Windows starts screaming there is no worry of it breaking or locking you out from using it again.
Heck, except for the product key, something like that could work for troubleshooting other people with similar machines.
So, OK. I actually purchased a legit copy of Windows 8.1 I want to install it as triple boot leaving my current copy of openSUE 13.1 and my current copy of Fedora 20 intact.
My proposed plan of attack:
I understand that Windows insists on being on the first drive, sda, which means I need to install a blank drive on the first SATA connection, and move what is now the first drive to the second slot, the current second to the third and so on.
Can I simply change the entries in fstab, and boot from the second drive and have the linux systems work?
When the linux systems are back running, I’ll disconnect them, and install Windows on the first drive. Then, reconnect the linux drives, start openSUSE, run grub2-install and I should be good to go, right?
I’m not clear as to when fstab is read. Is it only at boot, or periodically? Can I make a change to it and then shut down gracefully? Or, should I make the change, issue “sync” 3 or 4 times and then hit the reset?
I downed the machine, and added a new drive in the number 4 position.
Brought up the system and used gparted to create a GPT partition using the entire disk but leaving it unformatted.
I made two copies of fstab; oldfstab and newfstab
I modified newfstab to reflect what will be the new drive positions ie. drive 1 became 2 and drive 0 became drive 1.
I started the system using a rescue disk and copied newfstab to fstab
Downed the system and just for chucks and giggles, I tried to bring it up.
To my surprise, it came up without any problems at all. I didn’t run mkinitrd. It seems to have found the drive and then looked a fstab to find what else it needed.
Tomorrow, I’ll tru the Fedora installation and then it’s on to installing Windows!
Well, the Fedora install isn’t coming up. I messed with fstab, didn’t make any difference I could see. Not going to fuss with it anyway. I’ll wipe it and install version 21. I use it only for watching Netflix anyway. I don’t want to “clutter up” my openSUSE install with wine and all the special files needed for pipelight.
I suppose, after I install Windows, I won’t need Fedora for Netflix, but somehow I take great pleasure in using linux for that purpose! >:)
You can run netflix from chrome in openSUSE without hassle. Since the last couple stable versions it has all the DRM stuf straightened out, and run netflix OOTB, without the need for pipelight.
That is, if you can stand chrome, philosophically speaking. I do have it installed only for netflix, and FF for all the rest. I’ve also read a post by malcomlewis where he mentions the possibility of removing the auto-update cron job and repo chrome creates during installation.
