Copy of Hard Drive before Installation

From the Windows 7 License Agreement:

15. Upgrades. To use upgrade software, you must first be licenced for the software that is eligible for the upgrade. Upon upgrade, this agreement takes the place of the agreement for the software you upgraded from. After you upgrade, you may no longer use the software you upgraded from.

That said, there is no mechanism by which they track, disable or deactivate the old OS.

But why would you want it, as you will eventually discover? So just do the overwrite or install 7 to a second formatted primary HDD, make a backup image stored externally, and you never have to mess with XP/Vista again.

That said, there is no mechanism by which they track, disable or deactivate the old OS

How can you be so sure of this?

I'm presuming that during the upgrade, since they either ask you for the old key, or they get it from the machine you're upgrading, they do something back at MS to invalidate that key.

The "mechanism by which they could ... disable or deactivate the old OS" would then be simple -- next time the machine containing that OS boots and contacts MS, WPA/WGA will determine that key to now be invalid and will deactivate that installation.

OK, so I'm guessing they will do this and don't know for certain -- but they already do this with Vista keys to prevent reuse across other installations. So, they already have the "mechanism" in place to do a similar thing for XP-to-Seven upgrades.

Mark Phelps said:

That said, there is no mechanism by which they track, disable or deactivate the old OS

How can you be so sure of this?

I'm presuming that during the upgrade, since they either ask you for the old key, or they get it from the machine you're upgrading, they do something back at MS to invalidate that key.

The "mechanism by which they could ... disable or deactivate the old OS" would then be simple -- next time the machine containing that OS boots and contacts MS, WPA/WGA will determine that key to now be invalid and will deactivate that installation.

OK, so I'm guessing they will do this and don't know for certain -- but they already do this with Vista keys to prevent reuse across other installations. So, they already have the "mechanism" in place to do a similar thing for XP-to-Seven upgrades.

This has been debated at length on Technet with the MS MVP's and techs and they admit they have no mechanism for deactivating the key, and won't because it is needed for reinstalling the Upgrade if necessary.

Now they might be lying and that might change, but the Vista install I upgraded to Win7 on the next partition is still activated, even though I only need it for file transfer and then plan to delete it.

gregrocker said:

This has been debated at length on Technet with the MS MVP's and techs and they admit they have no mechanism for deactivating the key, and won't because it is needed for reinstalling the Upgrade if necessary.

Now they might be lying and that might change, but the Vista install I upgraded to Win7 on the next partition is still activated, even though I only need it for file transfer and then plan to delete it.

Thanks for the clarification.