what software do I need to backup OS

tenjay said:

it seems that windows takes the license directly from my machine and does not give me option to add a new one.

cheers

That is correct. Microsoft has actually made it impossible to 100% comply with their own EULA. For example, you wipe your retail Windows 10 OS installation completely off a computer and give it away or sell it. The recipient can install and activate the Windows 10 edition that was previously on it with just the generic product key. So, if a user desired to comply with the EULA and installed 4 Windows 10's on one computer, multi-booting, I would say have a piece of paper or file with 4 different valid product keys on it. That way when the FBI, CIA, NCIS, NSA or Microsoft thugs knocked on your door demanding to see your Windows 10 licenses you could just show them your product keys and tell them to pack sand. With Windows 10 (and 11) digital licensing scheme, though, there is no way Microsoft is going to know if your computer has 1 Windows 10 on it, or 20 Windows 10's on it.

NavyLCDR said:

I would say have a piece of paper or file with 4 different valid product keys on it. That way when the FBI, CIA, NCIS, NSA or Microsoft thugs knocked on your door demanding to see your Windows 10 licenses you could just show them your product keys and tell them to pack sand.

I'm having it type up as we speak lol.

Just to finish off with please.... does each OS read its boot info (as seen in msconfig) from the efi partition so that they are all in sync or does each OS have its own version from BCDboot entries made locally.

also. The OSs are not booting correctly but this is because of the existing fault not the imaging/multiboot. Would I be better to ask another question or should I continue here? basically the PC is taking 5 to 10 mins to boot which is part of the original issue with it.

All of the OS boot info is contained in the BCD file in the EFI System Partition. If you delete a partition, the pointer to the OS will actually still be in the BCD in the EFI System Partition, it just won't be valid anymore and you need to the BCD entry using either bcdedit or msconfig.

I would start a new thread for your other problems.

On a UEFI-GPT drive you have at least one UEFI Fat32 partition for the boot managers and one partition for the OS.
As you want 4 Windows versions, you can do:
- One UEFI Fat32 partition, one MS reserved, one Win 10 partition and one (optional) recover partition on four separate drives (each drive with all 4 partitions)
- One UEFI Fat32 partition, one MS reserved, 4 Win 10 partitions on a single multi boot drive.

Witch option you intent to do?

You can also have one drive with the EFI System partition and multiple different physical drives with OS partitions on them all booting from the same EFI partition on the first drive.