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Currently, I must uniquely identify an OS on a computer.
Now I use the serial of a disk and a partition number, which means the OS is installed in that partition of the disk. Because I think only one OS can be installed on one partition on a disk. So, that determines a unique OS.
Or, is there some better way to represent it?
Uniquely is a very slippery concept. Let’s say I make VirtualBox machine image, and run five identical instances on my server. They’ll all have the same disk serial number and the same partition id. Are they supposed to be the same, or different? Maybe you could add network address to the mix, so that could be the discriminator. But what if they are not networked?
There are many other possible grey areas: I can have a dozen different kernels on the same partition on a Linux system, and boot whichever one I choose at startup time. Should those all be the same, or different?
Early versions of Windows installed on top of a DOS install, and you booted in DOS and then brought up Windows on top of it. Are those two different OS’s or just one?