'Cloning' XP for games... legal? worth it?

[Matrox462]

Here's my dilemma...

I have a deskop with two 80Gb hard drives, and an external 80Gb hard drive for backup. I'm about to reformat the primary drive in the system and reinstall XP. The thing I dread the most with reinstalling the OS is having to reinstall all my games... quite a time consuming process with games like Doom 3, HL2, UT2004, GTA 3 & VC, NFSU, ect (especially ones that span across 6 CD's!) Putting back all my other data is as simple as a few clicks since I have the backup HD. So I was brainstorming and I had a great idea.

Is it legal to install Windows XP onto my primary hard drive, strip it of all the unnecessary programs I don't need (it's an OEM copy bundled with HP stuff), and use my drive cloning program to clone the OS to my secondary hard drive? I was thinking I could have two XP's installed, have a bootloader select which drive to boot, and use the second cloned copy purely for gaming.

Here's why this would benefit me:
1.) When reinstalling and formating my main OS, I can leave my game only drive alone and it will still be there. No need to reinstall about 20 games.
2.) It can act as a "back up" OS if something seriously screws up my main OS and need to access my data.
3.) I only have 512MB of RAM, and I *love* having tons of fancy stuff like widgets, programs in the taskbar to monitor stuff, ect. I hate having to close down all the memory hogs everytime I want to play a really intense game like HL2. With the second game OS I will strip away all unnecessary stuff like visual themes, ect; So my games will probably always run really fast just like it's a fresh install of windows.

I was thinking I could also just create another windows user to have it set up to not have visual themes and only have a few apps running in the background... but then that gets rid of the convenience of not having to reinstall games during a reformat.

So what do you guys think? Is it legal? Will it work? Does anyone have a recommendation of a bootloader to use that allows you to select which drive to boot? Will XP's built in OS selector work?

A lot of questions... sorry :) I'm really hoping I can do this, as it'll make life easier for me!

[djnes]

Why not get real cloning software like Ghost, install your games and apps, and then ghost an image file to your external drive?

[rcolbert]

Although there are other folks on this forum who can provide an authoritative answer, I believe that what you are suggesting is perfectly legal and legit since you can only run a single instance on that one PC at any given time.

Situations where that wouldn't be legal are if you were to move the second hard drive to another PC, or if you were to use Virtual PC or VMware and run multiple copies of the OS simultaneously.

As for running dual-boot to have a gaming OS and a non-gaming OS, that sounds like an interesting idea. The only key there is that you'll be installing patches and making configuration settings twice as often, but that's not too different from simply having two pc's. I don't run a configuration like that, so I can't speak to a third party bootloader. I would think the normal XP boot loader would be fine except you might not be able to boot the second hard drive if the first one fails without a little reconfiguration.

[Matrox462]

Why not get real cloning software like Ghost, install your games and apps, and then ghost an image file to your external drive?

I have DriveClone which I recieved for free. It's better than nothing, and I'll give it a shot and see how it works. Trust me, if I could clone the entire image of the HD with all my games and apps I would. But as of right now, my 80Gb backup drive is completely full from music, downloads, documents, ect, all by itself. There's no back up of OS files or games in that 80Gb hard drive. My games folder is 40.2Gb alone right now. So I'd need atleast a 120+Gb to copy an entire image with apps, my documents, games, ect. No way am I going to buy another HD just to save time on installing games.

I *will* however make a clone of just the OS to a DVD-R once it's installed so I won't have to install XP anymore. Just restore an image that already has my drivers and basic apps.

[Matrox462]

Although there are other folks on this forum who can provide an authoritative answer, I believe that what you are suggesting is perfectly legal and legit since you can only run a single instance on that one PC at any given time.

Situations where that wouldn't be legal are if you were to move the second hard drive to another PC, or if you were to use Virtual PC or VMware and run multiple copies of the OS simultaneously.

As for running dual-boot to have a gaming OS and a non-gaming OS, that sounds like an interesting idea. The only key there is that you'll be installing patches and making configuration settings twice as often, but that's not too different from simply having two pc's. I don't run a configuration like that, so I can't speak to a third party bootloader. I would think the normal XP boot loader would be fine except you might not be able to boot the second hard drive if the first one fails without a little reconfiguration.

Yea, I would think it's legal. Like you said, it's not like I'm running the copy on a different computer. Maybe somebody will be able to tell me for sure. Either way, I doubt there should be a problem since it's not like this XP copy has to be activated or anything since it's an OEM copy that only installs on an HP computer.

As far as patching, I'm on a 3Mb DSL connection, so all patches will download fast anyways. Do you think I should even bother installing SP2 if I'm using it only for games? There will be an online connection though, behind a wireless router, to play online games.

This shold be really interesting if it works :)
Thanks for the reply

[rcolbert]

I'd definitely go with SP2. No reason not to really.

SP1 + a zillion patches will over the course of time become a fragile environment.

[Ryland]

the XP license is that it can only be installed on one machine. It sounds like you only have it on 1 machine with a dual boot of itself. No problems there

[Grimmda]

I too understand what you're shooting for and here's what I do (I understand you might not be able to do this but our end goals are the same).

I keep a FRESH copy of XP/SP2 slipstreamed image on hand.

On a crappy computer I built packaged apps (of things like Winzip/Nero/Winamp) that I can install with a single double click.

As far as games, I don't have the need to re-install ALL my games the moment I'm done but what YOU could do is make packaged installs OF your games. That will work.

I use Ghost's AI Builder for packaging but there's lots of apps (probably free ones) you could make the packages of your games with.

When when you need to reload you slap your XP base load onto your box, apply any updates from the web and then install your packaged apps.

I can be back up and going full tilt and clean in less than one hour. (but with a weeks project work to prepare for this task)