I just updated my hard drive, I cloned the new one from the old. After I did, I had to re-install my program certificate. Did I break anything in doing this? Should I have uninstalled prior to doing the upgrade? I have only installed one of my two installs so far...
Don't worry, that should not cause any problems.
Why exactly is this necessary? Does Opus read the HDD serial number or partition layout or something like that as part of its copy-protection scheme?
It's part of our NSA back-door, but shhh, don't tell anyone.
It isn't usually necessary. Not knowing the details of how the drive was cloned makes it hard to guess why it was needed in this case, but I suspect the drive cloning tool missed something.
Note that we don't generally go into details of how the copy protection works, for obvious reasons, unless there's an actual problem that needs solving (which there isn't here; the OP's problem was already solved before posting and they were just asking if there were any issues with how they solved it, which there are not).
I knew it !!! 
I knew it !!! [/quote]
Fair enough. There have been too many dodgy copy protection schemes in the past though, so if this sort of thing happens I usually load up a debugger/sandbox and check what is going on. Such things tend to be fragile with non-standard configurations, and I don't want to find out the hard way.
I used the mini partition tool wizard (I think v8.1) to clone the drive. My MS windows 8.1 and office subscriptions had to be re-registered also
Thanks ronstrasky. It looks like Opus uses the mechanism used and recommended by Microsoft to tie itself to a Windows installation. FWIW it doesn't appear to do anything worrying in a sandbox environment so nothing to worry about.
I wasn't aware Microsoft published or recommended anything like that.
It's in the brochure that the NSA sends to all software companies on how to implement backdoors.
Check out MSDN. There are well documented ways to get unique IDs for Windows, several in fact. System.Identity.UniqueID or various keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion, for example.
I'm an embedded software engineer so it isn't my area of expertise, but I found lots of good info here: bit.ly/1iANXof