2 boxes same id?

A question, Currently running win 10 home 64 on this machine. Just
purchased a new machine running win 10 pro 64 and was wondering if I
could use the same Microsoft id to log in on that one?. Also I will be
selling this box and wonder what I will need to do to eliminate id theft
possibilities. Could I just do a "reset pc" to do it. The person buying
this is not what I would call a expert so I highly doubt they would or
could find anything. Also I do not believe it has ever been used for
anything financial or necessarily personally identifiable.

Drew wrote:
A question, Currently running win 10 home 64 on this machine. Just
purchased a new machine running win 10 pro 64 and was wondering if I
could use the same Microsoft id to log in on that one?. Also I will be
selling this box and wonder what I will need to do to eliminate id theft
possibilities. Could I just do a "reset pc" to do it. The person buying
this is not what I would call a expert so I highly doubt they would or
could find anything. Also I do not believe it has ever been used for
anything financial or necessarily personally identifiable.

Using your MSA on two machines, allows OneDrive and various Cloud
syncing things to happen. Say you had the calendar set up
on one machine, you could view your calendar on the other machine.

The MSA is used to take advantage of the Cloud.

If you're about to give away the machine or sell it,
then such a linkage isn't the best. Once the factory
restore is done, the new user can enter his/her MSA
and (somehow) Microsoft is going to have to deal with
that at their end, and realize that hardware hash no longer
belongs to you.

Note that, once you use the MSA, Microsoft has the possibility
of using that reference for "reverse" purposes. Microsoft
has tied activation to an entered MSA as an example. If you change
motherboards in a machine that had a Digital Entitlement for example,
using the same MSA later takes advantage of the linkage (the tracking
of hardware belonging to the account), to get the new motherboard
to activate. Now, that sounds like license multiplication, and
I might have heard the details wrong. The point is, once machine
hashes and MSAs are mixed, that gives Microsoft more "power of association"
to work with.

I don't claim to know all the details, and all I can say is,
I hope Microsoft doesn't **** it up. Because they could, easily.
The new owner, using their own MSA, should really put an end to it.

*******

In Disk Management, if you look at the disk layout, there may be
an OEM Factory Restore, plus the C: partition, System Reserved,
Recovery partition. The Recovery partition may have a 300MB WinRE.wim
emergency boot image (i.e. it's not an OS installer and doesn't
recover anything). System Reserved has your BCD (for the boot menu
and usage by bcdedit). In cases where C: is encrypted, System Reserved
exists as an un-encrypted partition that aids in booting the encrypted
portion.

So those are some examples of partitions.

There might be an OEM Factory Restore partition, with anywhere
from 4GB to 12GB of stuff. 4GB would be enough space to hold
a .WIM or .ESD from the OEM supplier, for installing an OS.

12GB would be sufficient to contain a "copy" of a virgin C:
drive, captured from just after installation, and in Out-Of-Box
state.

You want to *keep* this partition, whether it's 4GB
or 12GB. When you got the machine, you made a set of emergency
discs (DVDs) intended to archive the factory partition - you could
use those discs if you had to, to recovery from any fumbling.
So as long as you made those discs, I don't see anything you
do from this point onward as being "unrecoverable" :-)

If you wanted to, you could erase the entire hard drive.
As long as you give those discs to the new owner, and the
discs are actually "good".

*******

There shouldn't be anything personal in System Reserved or
Recovery or in the OEM 12GB partition. The C: partition needs
to be swept.

You want the C: partition written with zeros.

https://www.lifewire.com/use-the-for...-drive-2626162

"The format command gained write-zero abilities beginning
in Windows Vista so if you have an older operating system,
you won't be able to use the format command as
data destruction software."

OK, so we need something other than the C: drive, to
boot the computer. For example, the Control Panel that
has "Windows 7 Backup for Win10", should have an item on the left
to make an emergency boot CD. That CD would end up being
around 300MB. There will be an option in there, to open
a Command Prompt. You should end up being Administrator.
You can use the "whoami" command for fun, just to verify
what kind of account the Command Prompt is using.

(From 4GB installer DVD, free to download...)

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html

(From 300MB CD you make in Windows 7 backup screen or using other method...)

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html

To erase C: on a Vista or newer computer, we can use this
(newly discovered to me) zeroing capability :-) The P parameter
is a pass count. A pass count of "0" causes one pass over the
surface writing blocks of zeros. If you use a pass count of
1 or 2 or N, it's just going to take more time, and be
harder to verify later. The /p:0 should be perfect for
the job.

format c: /fs:NTFS /p:0

So we're booted with the emergency CD, or we're booted with
the Win10 Installer DVD (which also has a Command Prompt
option), and before we issue the command, we need to verify
it's really the correct partition. When the emergency environment
boots, it's boot partition ix X: , so we wouldn't
want to erase X: right now. That would be self-defeating.

Now, the partition letters don't have to exactly match
the real environment. So in the command prompt, we try

dir C:
dir D:
dir E:
dir F:

and so on. The C: drive should have "Program Files". It
should have a "Users". It should have a pagefile or
hiberfil. These are "markers" you can look for, in the
output of "dir", to verify you have the correct partition
to erase.

Once I'm sure C: is really C:, then it's time for

format c: /fs:NTFS /p:0

*Now*, after potentially *hours* have passed, it's time
for the OEM recovery procedure. The user manual will
mention the purpose of various F keys. Like F2, F12, F10.
F2 might be "enter the BIOS". F12 might be "popup boot menu".
And maybe F10 is some kind of "restore to factory". You're
going to need to press that key, before the system tries to boot
with the (now completely zeroed) C: partition.

When you restore to factory, that 12GB partition we were
careful to not erase, can be used to "re-inflate" C: . The
process should not write every sector. It only puts the
12GB worth of files back. However, because we used the
format with zeros command, we know the "white space" on the
disk, contains none of your personal information. So those
hours spent formatting, make it impossible for Photorec or
Recuva to recover your personal files. The C: parition
now has the 12GB of factory files, and the rest of the
partition is all-zeros.

That's a summary of how I'd (attempt) to do it.

You can use this utility to open a disk for raw I/O.
There is a separate menu item to open a disk. You'd
need to start it as "Run As Administrator", to be able
to read sectors. On the freshly restored OEM C:, now
you'd "go up high" in LBAs and have a look around for
lots and lots of zeros. As evidence the scrubbing the
format did, worked. Since the factory restore would
write maybe 12GB of data, you might set the address
in HXD just past the 12Gb mark, and have a look around.

https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

If you happened to have jkdefrag version 3.36 handy
or similar, you could try

jkdefrag -a 1 -d 2 C:

and that will display a colored block diagram showing
where the data is located on the disk. That would also
help a person understand where to look with HXD.

I would prefer to verify the C: is clean, before
the OEM restore, but that would take more work. I
have a nice little compressor here I can use for that,
and between "dd" and my compressor, I would get a
1KB file as output, to prove the entire terabyte
size C: , is zero. So there is a way to prove
it's clean, but it's just not as easy to do. And
we can't run HXD from the Command Prompt, as it's a GUI
version as far as I know, and doesn't do Command Prompt
only.

If you had a second computer to use, and moved the
hard drive into the second computer, as if it was
a data drive, a lot of these steps would be
a *lot* easier. All this booting of CDs to do
stuff, is for the birds. But I've tried to craft
this procedure, so even a person owning just
one computer, can do it. Some people don't like
to move a disk drive from one desktop PC to another
desktop PC, and my procedure does not require the
side panel of the computer to be removed.

You will need to read the user manual for the machine.
You might also want to make the DVD set, if you haven't
done it already.

And while you can download Win10 from the Internet, and
install using that, it'll still activate, but it won't
have any OEM software on it (no Zynga games). The new user
always has the option of using that DVD to blow away even
the factory partition, and use Microsoft software from
now on. The MSDM license key stored in the BIOS, would
ensure a Win10 era computer will still be able to automatically
activate a fresh install of Win10 using a Microsoft DVD.
Win10 OEM machines don't have a COA sticker on the outside,
and the unique key value, is stored in a BIOS table.

Enjoy,
Paul