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A friend of my had pirated version of Windows Vista; and he wanted to get Windows 7. Since he is student as me; he can download licensed Windows 7 legally from college. So he did, and installed it. From Windows 7 side, everything was ok. But when he booted back to Windows Vista; he had a notification that his Windows have been detected not to be genuine and to input serial key; or something like that. Since he is happy with Windows 7; he got rid of XP and copied files from Windows 7

My question is purely academic; how is it possible for Windows 7 to modify Vista partition? And, yes, Windows 7 was installed to separate partition.

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protected by studiohack♦ May 6 '11 at 23:50

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Part of the changes to WGA, Windows 7 setup will detect any installed versions of other windows OSes on a multi-boot scenario. With that it proceeds to check that older version validity. If it is an illegal copy, it will make the necessary changes to retag that installation as illegal.

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If I read your question correctly, the Windows 7 OS installation itself had little to do with the Windows XP being identified as pirated. Please read on before disputing this point.

What probably happened is that as part of installation of Win7, the Windows Genuine Advantage software, which he agreed to the installation of, checked for any installations of Windows on ALL partitions, found the pirated installation, and notified him on the next execution of the pirated OS, WinXP.

Although I don't believe in pirated software, I will tell you that the installation of XP would have been "operationally" been fine to use, however, "ethically", it isn't.

Microsoft, approx. 1-2 years ago had to remove the "crippler" it used when an OS was pirated and instead switched to a mandatory black wallpaper with a small permanent reminder in the lower right hand corner of the screen that your OS failed "WGA" and may be pirated.

I hope this helps.

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sorry; it seems that it was vista, and not xp. And he claims that he couldn't do nothing without entering serial key. – bbaja42 Oct 26 '09 at 16:27
Was that a deliberate double negative? – Hello71 Jul 6 '10 at 20:47
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