Any trick to reinstalling?

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
01/21/2016 at 19:54 • Filed to: None

I picked up a notebook the other day, a 2007-vintage MacBook, and want to make a few changes. The previous owner is a software developer, and as such has it loaded with Windows 8.1 and Office 2013, with no Mac partition. Even though this software combo is not officially supported by Apple it works - sort of. It works OK, but some drivers are missing, such as the one for trackpad.

The SSD will be yanked and installed in my MacBook Pro, and this means that I’ll have to grab another drive out of the collection and install it in this computer - no big deal. I have the serial numbers for Windows and Office, and wonder if there will be any issues reinstalling this stuff.

Have there been any changes to the installation and activation of these products that I should be aware of?

DISCUSSION (12)

Caleb "If a rally car can do it, so can my Malibu" M. S. > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
01/21/2016 at 19:58

Have you tried turning it on and off again?

ttyymmnn > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
01/21/2016 at 20:00

I have done installs of Windows using Boot Camp and have had no problems. Once you get the Windows installed, there should be a Mac Software Update in the Control Panel. Run that and you should be good to go. I will say, though, that it’s been a long time since I’ve done this. You might also research your particular MacBook and see if there is a limit to which Win OS you can put on it. Good luck.

ttyymmnn > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
01/21/2016 at 20:04

http://arstechnica.com/information-te…

JGrabowMSt > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
01/21/2016 at 21:15

Pound F8 while booting and hope it takes you to the recovery options and allows you to “refresh” or “restore” the pc to factory settings.

Otherwise, need to go duke nukem with an install disc on it.

FTTOHG Has Moved to https://opposite-lock.com > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
01/21/2016 at 22:13

How badly fubared is the Windows install? Do you plan to do multiple partitions on the old MacBook? (You probably don’t want to run OSX on a machine that old unless you are going back to 10.6. I have 10.10 on a 2007 iMac right now and it’s painfully slow.). If you think you an clean up the windows install with some basic maintenance then I would just use XXClone to clone the SSD to a drive in a USB enclosure then tear open the MacBook and swap in the cloned drive.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > ttyymmnn
01/21/2016 at 22:17

I’ve used Boot Camp before and it’s fairly straightforward. In this particular situation, the entire drive is formatted as NTFS. Boot Camp requires starting from a MacOS partition, which this computer doesn’t have. As such I’m going to have to nuke the current install to do a proper Boot Camp setup.

The computer is running Windows 8.1 even though it isn’t officially supported; the newest version that is officially supported is Windows 7 32-bit. I’ll probably re-use the 8.1 license in a different computer as this MacBook is just going to be a backup system and will be running MacOS most of the time, with only one PC program needed once or twice a year; that can run under Vista or XP just fine since it dates back to 2000, and I’ve got enough licenses to allow for this.

My main concern is whether or not there have been changes to the installation and activation of Windows and Office after Windows 7. Is it the same technique as before - just install and plug in the serial - or is there something new involving the license being tied to the BIOS? Given that it’s working on the MB I would guess that things really haven’t changed, but I want to be certain before I erase the drive and start over.

ttyymmnn > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
01/21/2016 at 22:20

That is something that I just don’t know. Sorry.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > FTTOHG Has Moved to https://opposite-lock.com
01/21/2016 at 22:28

The Windows install works quite well, with the exception of the missing functions on the trackpad; Apple doesn’t officially support this combo, so no native drivers. No big deal.

I want to install 10.6 on it, with another partition for Windows via Boot Camp. I can’t install OS X since the drive is formatted NTFS at the moment. I’ve cloned the SSD to the old 250 GB drive out of the MacBook Pro and it works, but it’s still Windows-only. Nuking it and reinstalling it will be the only option.

Will I encounter any problems reusing the Windows and Office licenses on a different computer? I’m putting together a little quad-core machine out of spare parts and figured that I could transfer the software over there, despite the fact that the rules probably state that I have to buy a new copy of everything. I thought that things had changed and now the license key was somehow tied to the hardware via the BIOS, but I may be mistaken.

FTTOHG Has Moved to https://opposite-lock.com > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
01/21/2016 at 23:27

Yes MS does track what machine it is on. You should be able to reuse the licenses in new hardware if you aren’t using two copies at once, but YMMV. If the PO bought a retail copy of Windows you should be OK. OEM ones can’t move. You need to deactivate Windows on the old machine before you can activate it on the new one. So don’t wipe the old PC until the new one is up and going, or at least deactivate the old one before wiping it. I forget exactly how to do this, but it is something at the command line. Google for deactivating Windows should be able to help out. Office follows a similar procedure.

In the meantime as long as everything is backed up, you could try EASEUS Partition Master Free to shrink the Windows partition and the create a new HFS partition to install OSX on. Might be a pain getting both to boot properly but it can be done.

Clown Shoe Pilot > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
01/22/2016 at 00:02

The OS will noticed that the CPU serial number and the MAC address and whatnot have changed, and that will very likely trigger the “genuine windows” system to re-activate. As long as the serial number on that machine hasn’t been re-activated a billion times on different hardware (usually interpreted as mass cloning/piracy) you should be fine. MS realizes that computers die and drives get moved into new hosts from time to time. I just did this on a machine at work. I had to re-activate some software which didn’t even require serial numbers, just clicking the “yeah, go ahead and do that” button.

Now... if the HAL is significantly different between the hardware platforms, you may be screwed on a different level. However, assuming the thing boots at all, your getting square w/ the licensing server should be pretty easy.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > FTTOHG Has Moved to https://opposite-lock.com
01/22/2016 at 04:31

Thanks for the info. I wasn’t aware of the ability to deactivate a copy of Windows, but that does make sense, although I don’t exactly have a lot of faith that Microsoft will allow me to reactivate it; they may surprise me - I was pleased to find that I could still activate XP even after they ceased support.

When it comes to the format and partitions, I suspect that a full repartition will be necessary. The Mac side needs to be GUID and the drive is currently MBR, and I doubt that there is any software that can make such a dramatic change without affecting the data on the drive.

I’ll continue with the experiments, but will leave the original SSD as-is until I’m satisfied that the other two systems are working as they should.

FTTOHG Has Moved to https://opposite-lock.com > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
01/22/2016 at 09:20

EASEUS Partition Master should be able to convert MBR to GPT without data loss. Not sure about if you need the paid version to do it. And yeah you never know if it will actually work so I always have that backup before I try anything like that.