[tlug] [Becoming OT] Re: problem with MBR

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Jon Povey writes:

 > I've done unfortunate things before like booting with a broken
 > machine's system disk plugged in (to rescue it) and having Windows
 > decide to permanently rename MY system disk to something wacky like
 > F:, persisting after the other drive was removed, and causing much
 > breakage.
 > 
 > fdisk /mbr cured it. I assume it wiped out a GUID written to the MBR to 
 > identify the drive.. or somesuch.

Yeah, that's precisely what I'm afraid of.  You might void your
license doing that with Vista or Seven.  I've heard that with Windows
7 if you "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb" then swap the drives, the boot
will fail with an unlicensed hardware error.  (This from a university
technician who as far as I know doesn't hate Microsoft.)  Might be
just FUD, but then turn about is fair play. ;-)