Can I use my Windows 7 license in a dual-boot configuration?

I've purchased a retail license of Windows 7 Ultimate for my machine at home.

I'm thinking of creating a dual-boot install:

• 64-bit install for work apps (need the RAM for virtual machines and RAMDisk)


• 32-bit install for entertainment apps (Media Centre, games, etc)

How does retail licensing work in such situations?
Can I activate the same license on both installations?

Edit:

I would like to add that I want to have separate partitions for work and play.

Answer

Who knows. The EULA which will determine this has not yet officially been published by Microsoft.

Can I activate the same license on
both installations?

Looking at the EULA for Vista, yes and no.

Technically, yes. Because the activation wizard will see that you are installing onto the same machine it should activate without question.

Legally, no. You are only permitted to have one single copy installed at any given time.

Really interesting article here for bedtime reading although it does only apply to Vista. Again, no official word on the 7 EULA yet.

How does retail licensing work in such
situations?

Retail boxes will come with a single key that activates both the 32-bit and the 64-bit flavours. You simply select the 32-bit or 64-bit version during the installation process.

Asus P6X58-E WS motherboard memory limits

I've just ordered motherboard Asus P6X58-E WS, and now I'm, looking for memory for it.

It has 6 slots, but the strange thing is, that in specifications it says that it is limited to 24G of memory .
I'm planning on using 8G Kingston KVR1333D3D4R9S/8G sticks with it. Using those sticks, I'll be teoretically limited to 48G. Does the 24G limitation mean, that even if I install all 6 sticks, I still will be limited by 24G of possible memory?
Sorry if the question seems dumb, but I never faced such a limitation before

Answer

the problem was with memory. Once I've installed non-buffered ecc, the system booted and started to work

hard drive - Disk Partitions and Performance

I've got the following partition set up on one of my hard drives (Samsung 1TB HD103SJ):

This wasn't the original setup. Before, there were 2 partitions just before the 'Games' partition (a previous Windows OS install, and its 'System Reserved' partition). I've deleted both partitions because I had just purchased an SSD. Then, I've extended the 'Data' partition using the 2 previous partitions' space.

After doing so, I now have this kind of weird partitioning going on. The good thing is 'Data' partition is now 100GB larger than before. The bad thing, however, is that it's located on opposite ends of the drive (not sure if this is how hard drives work, by the way). Although it looks like it's two different partitions, it appears as one 'Data' partition/drive on Windows Explorer.

My question is: are there any disadvantages with this kind of drive/partition setup? If so, how can I fix this?

Answer

I see your disk 0 is dynamic.
Volumes consisting of multiple partitions are OK for dynamic disks.

It's a feature of Veritas Volume Manager under Microsoft branding.

As for opposite ends of the drive, yes, beginning of the disk is a bit faster and ending of the disk is a bit slower, but not that much:

windows 10 - Ctrl+Shift+Home has stopped working on multiple keyboards and the OSK

Yesterday, I noticed that Ctrl+Shift+Home did not select all characters between the caret and the beginning of the document, as expected. Likewise for Ctrl+Shift+End. This change applies for all applications.

The Home, End, Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End, Shift+Home, Shift+End, and Ctrl+Shift+arrow key/key combinations still work normally. This behavior holds for my laptop keyboard, a Bluetooth keyboard, and the onscreen keyboard. The Alt, Ctrl, Shift, and Fn keys work normally, beyond this specific combination. Caps Lock, Fn Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock, likewise.

Oddly, within a remote desktop Ctrl+Shift+Home does still work.

Clearly some configuration has changed, but I have no idea what; certainly I haven't been mucking about in the keyboard settings. Rebooting has not fixed the problem. Keyboard language settings are normal (I'm only using English, and I disabled the keys for switching languages a long time ago). The Windows display language is English, the country is United States, and the keyboard is Qwerty - nothing unusual. I've been using this machine for 18 months, and the last Windows update was two weeks ago, long before this problem. There are no driver updates available.

I can only think of one thing which could possibly be relevant: recently while editing a Word document, it switched to French spelling corrections, somehow; perhaps I hit an odd keyboard combination. I switched Word back to English.

A similar question has been asked before, but none of the fixes there have changed anything. Has anyone else seen this problem?

Answer

You're using the opera browser. A recent update there causes this issue. See here: https://forums.opera.com/topic/35038/latest-opera-update-breaks-essential-ctrl-shift-home-end-windows-shortcuts/27
Close the browser and all the issues are resolved.
1 workaround mentioned in above post works, to restore settings to factory defaults.

USB Flash drive corrupt files - Help needed

I have a 16GB usb flash drive with 8GB worth of data that I can't afford to lose. When I inserted it into my pc, inside the folder that I was storing the data I saw unintelligible characters and nothing in there would open.

I ran windows scandisk and the files (unfortunately) disappeared. I can see that the drive's space still appears to be taken up with data, about 8gb.

What should I do to recover it? Is it possible?

linux - How to determine which partition has badblocks?

I have the following device:

Model Family:     Western Digital Caviar Green (AF)
Device Model:     WDC WD15EARS-00MVWB0
Serial Number:    WD-WCAZA3607921
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2b01eac3e
Firmware Version: 51.0AB51
User Capacity:    1,500,301,910,016 bytes [1.50 TB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 2.6, 3.0 Gb/s
Local Time is:    Thu Nov 21 00:08:20 2013 CET
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

and recently I got an error while reading the surface of this disk. This is the error:

Complete error log:
SMART Error Log Version: 1
ATA Error Count: 25 (device log contains only the most recent five errors)
    CR = Command Register [HEX]
    FR = Features Register [HEX]
    SC = Sector Count Register [HEX]
    SN = Sector Number Register [HEX]
    CL = Cylinder Low Register [HEX]
    CH = Cylinder High Register [HEX]
    DH = Device/Head Register [HEX]
    DC = Device Command Register [HEX]
    ER = Error register [HEX]
    ST = Status register [HEX]
Powered_Up_Time is measured from power on, and printed as
DDd+hh:mm:SS.sss where DD=days, hh=hours, mm=minutes,
SS=sec, and sss=millisec. It "wraps" after 49.710 days.
Error 25 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 18798 hours (783 days + 6 hours)
  When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle.
  After command completion occurred, registers were:
  ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
  -- -- -- -- -- -- --
  40 51 08 00 40 37 e6  Error: UNC 8 sectors at LBA = 0x06374000 = 104284160
  Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
  CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC   Powered_Up_Time  Command/Feature_Name
  -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --  ----------------  --------------------
  c8 00 08 00 40 37 e6 08      08:54:35.771  READ DMA
  ec 00 00 00 00 00 a0 08      08:54:35.763  IDENTIFY DEVICE
  ef 03 46 00 00 00 a0 08      08:54:35.763  SET FEATURES [Set transfer mode]

This is the 25th error but previous errors are exactly the same.

Here's a smart report:

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       1
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   253   189   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       2066
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1118
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   075   075   000    Old_age   Always       -       18833
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1101
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       277
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   085   085   000    Old_age   Always       -       346753
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   122   109   000    Old_age   Always       -       28
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       1
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       2
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   196   000    Old_age   Always       -       11
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       1

So, it's not a bad sector yet, but I think it will be.

I have 7 partitions on that drive, and the problem is that I don't know where the sector(s) is, which partition or/and which MiB, KiB, etc. starting from the beginning of the disk. Is there a way to figure that out?

Answer

I found how to do it. The following line in smart report determines the LBA:

40 51 08 00 40 37 e6  Error: UNC 8 sectors at LBA = 0x06374000 = 104284160

So, it's 104284160. If we know that, we also know which partition is involved:

root:~# fdisk -lu /dev/sda
Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
...
/dev/sda3        99610624  1466798079   683593728   83  Linux

To determine where exactly on the 3rd partition that is:

104284160 - 99610624 = 4673536

We also have to know the block size:

# tune2fs -l /dev/mapper/crypt_data  | grep Block
Block count:              170897920
Block size:               4096
Blocks per group:         32768

And now we can determine which File System Block contains this LBA using the following formula:

   b = (int)((L-S)*512/B)
where:
b = File System block number
B = File system block size in bytes
L = LBA of bad sector
S = Starting sector of partition as shown by fdisk -lu
and (int) denotes the integer part.

In my case that would be:

b = (int)((104284160-99610624)*512/4096
b=584192

Now we have to check if there's a file there:

# debugfs
debugfs 1.42.8 (20-Jun-2013)
debugfs:  open /dev/mapper/crypt_data
debugfs:  testb 584192
Block 584192 marked in use
debugfs:  icheck 584192
Block   Inode number
584192  37486656
debugfs:  ncheck 37486656
Inode   Pathname
37486656    /some/file

And that's basically it. Now I have to manually reallocate the sector. More info how to do it, you can find here.

How to diagnose computer hardware without booting?

One of my desktops stopped working after I tried to switch the memory stick.

And the system can't boot up now.

I'm now using my laptop,thinking if there are any method to detect which part of the desktop is actually in trouble.

Thinking in economy,what's the cheapest solution?