A gold image is a static, non-bootable software image that exists on the hard drive of an enterprise partition platform and will, after the commissioning process, be the source of the software stack residing in a partition (or more formally, a partition image). A gold image is associated with one or more blueprints, providing the blueprints with the desired user software. (For blueprints supplied by Unisys, this association takes place in the factory). For the commissioning to occur, a gold image must be associated with a blueprint. See Overview of Commissioning a Partition to know more about Commissioning a partition.