New built system

[transferguy]

Posted by: dkerr

Well spent 2 weeks building new computers for myself as well as taking a day to redo the systems on 2 computers for a friend.

Now have a new motherboard with an intel I7 cpu, 6 hard drives, an docking bay for additional drive, blu ray, 16 gig memory which I intend to expand the boards max at 32 gig. Had bought four 24" hd monitors, 3 for one computer, 1 for another.

Found out what microsoft's max activation's are - 3 then the product key gets black listed. Windows 7 - 64 bit I bought 2 or 3 years ago, then a month ago I redid the system, then redid again after getting hard drive failure warnings, that is 3 activations. Now rebuilt with all new hardware, to find out the product key is now black listed and will not work. Always one computer with a legal purchase of windows 7 ultimate 64 bit. Tried to call Microsoft after 20 minutes of waiting I just hung up and dug out my pre-activated pirate copy version of the same operating system install disk. I know they want to protect there products but does not take into account these type of situations.

Will add a external raid set later. Have installed a video edit system on it.

Next what is the best method to duplicate the system drive? need to copy boot sectors, system partition and main partition basically identical in every respect.

Don

[transferguy]

posted by: chrisb

I use Norton ghost for drive cloning. You can find it as part Hirens utility disk version 10 or earlier.

[transferguy]

posted by: navyguy

Posted by dkerr
Tried to call Microsoft after 20 minutes of waiting I just hung up and dug out my pre-activated pirate copy version of the same operating system install disk. I know they want to protect there products but does not take into account these type of situations.

Actually they do. If you stick it out, they will remove your product key from the list. They look at a number of different items when then confirm your activation including the MB, amount of memory, associated drives, NICs, etc. In doing so they can determine if the computer was "substantially" changed to make it a "new" computer.

When you talk to them just tell them that the MB and the main drives are the same, the rest is just hardware upgrades and there should not be a problem. I / We have had to do this a number of times for various clients of ours in the past.

Cheers

John

[transferguy]

posted by: navyguy

Nice set-up. I have a similar one for almost 2 years now...

i7 - 2600 CPU at 3.4 GHz
32 GB
64 Bit

I have eight 250 GB of SSD in a raid 10 configuration for the operating system and programs with a 1Tb standard drive for read/write purposes.

I am a big fan of NAS. Although I have access to standard physical servers, I like to have the NAS. Don't like all my eggs in one basket so to speak. I have one NAS dedicated for daily back-ups in a raid 1 configuration as well as others in other configurations.

For testing purposes I also have a fibre optic NIC as well as a standard NIC.
I also use DVI for dual monitor. I have thought about going for a third monitor... but it is more of an issue with room then desire ;-)

This was the video that got me thinking on what I was going to do with the new SSDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs


Cheers

John

[transferguy]

posted by: dkerr

Thanks for the replies, I will check more on Norton ghost but what I read on some sites it is discontinued in favour of another of their products.

I wanted to keep the system drive separate from the other drives, using a 1 tb drive as a system drive, and 5 - 2tb drives but not in a raid, want to add an external raid system using usb 3.0 interface with the computer.

Navyguy, I am sure your 8 - 256 g ssd's are performing very well, you also gain some speed using the strip raid configuration as they work together in addition to the speed ssd give.

Using intel I7-4770K @ 3.50ghz with multiple cores
windiws 7 64 bit

3 - 24" HD monitors, the video card has 1 gb memory, 2 - dvi and 2 hdmi, so 2 monitors are fed directly from dvi the 3rd used a hdmi to dvi adapter.

Have 16 gb memory ddr3 1600 but will be increasing to board's max at 32 gb

Have dsl but in the summer will upgrade to fiber.

It was actually a new computer rebuild only thing reused was the case itself, everything inside was changed. The old motherboard was put in another case which is set up for my wife.

Solid state drive are nice but the cost is still significantly higher than regular hard drives and often lack in size individually unless you really want to spend a lot of money for them. All my hard drives have a rotation speed of 7200 large buffers and sata 3's.

I would like to however back up the system drive to make it easy to restore that or replace without spending so much time in setting up again if ever a need, but it needs to be able to restore partitions and system exactly as it is now.

Just to note thought windows 7 experience index assessment gave me as results...

(SCALE FROM 1.0 TO 7.9)
Processor 7.8
Memory 7.8
Graphics 7.6
gaming graphics 7.6
primary hard disk 5.9

Don