Patent ID: 7930728

Claim:
A computer system comprising: a storage device having: two or more sectors partitioned based upon logical block address (LBA) ranges, each sector having a unique sector number, each of the two or more sectors storing a respective operating system; and one or more partition tables including pointers to each sector; a chipset coupled to the storage device to access the sectors of the storage device, the chipset including a trusted platform module (TPM) having protected registers that are writable by commands initiated by trusted microcode; and a network controller coupled to the chipset having a manageability engine (ME) to receive policies from one or more remote agents via a network, to evaluate the policies against credentials in the TPM and to enforce the policies, wherein for each of the two or more sectors: the ME to determine, prior to the computer system performing a boot up, whether a respective license for the operating system stored in the sector has expired, the license for allowing execution of the operating system by the computer system; and where the respective license for the operating system is determined to have expired, the ME to disable an access to the sector by the computer system.