Question about reinstalling Vista with a student volume license key

[archcommus]

Hey guys, I got a Vista Ultimate 32-bit student volume license key from my school that I'm running currently. I may be needing to do a reinstall soon and was told by the school computer staff that it's a one-time license deal so re-activating might give me problems, and if it does the solution would be to physically bring it to them to have them install it. Considering I have a 20-some-lb. desktop and the building is almost a mile away this would be a huge pain. My question is, do you think this works similar to the OEM licenses, where online activation won't work but I'll be able to call Microsoft and tell them my hard drive died and activate that way?

Thanks.

 

[corkyg]

Backup your drive, i.e., create a duplicate drive using a clone function. Then give it a try. It should be OK. If not, reclone back to the original and you are still alive.

Alternatively, get a second drive and install Ultimate 32 from scratch and use the key ID. If it works - you are good to go. If not - stick with the old drive and rather than reinstall, do some maintenance on your files and programs, etc.

 

[archcommus]

Thanks. The situation I'm discussing is needing to replace my hard drive, in which case a simple clone is actually probably the best thing to do since all other hardware is remaining the same. So I created a full backup using Vista's Complete PC Backup. Hopefully it works well enough, however I'm concerned about PATA to SATA issues, making another thread about that. Thanks for recommending cloning!

However, in the future when I'm doing a full upgrade, a reinstall will be necessary, so I'm still curious what people think re-activating might be like with a student volume license key.