Can a pre-inbstalled windows be put inside a VM?

[Fintan]

I knew what VMDK was but have never used rsync. I'll have to try that over the weekend.

Cheers

[SteveRiley]

Sorry...my bad for lapsing to geek-speak. rsync is a very flexible and fast file transfer utility, useful to know if you have a habit of moving lots of files around because of its delta-sync capabilities. A VMDK is a VMware virtual machine.

Oh, and SLMGR is the Windows software license manager.

[Fintan]

I do in fact have my old desktop, which I haven't started for ages. It also has vmplayer on board but what do you mean by:

rsync your VMDK

Sorry for my ignorance.

[SteveRiley]

If you just happen to have another machine also running VMware Player, and you just happen to have a spare 120 days to conduct an experiment, then please [strike]xcopy[/strike] (sorry, old habits die hard) rsync your VMDK over to that other computer. Start the VM and observe what happens. Do it again after 120 days. If SLMGR doesn't gripe, I'll be floored.

[Fintan]

I am np expert but I believe the converter takes care of that.

One note of cation though. Depnding on your CPU, you have to play with how many cores the converter uses for the conversion.

[SteveRiley]

Wow! That's amazing, and I'm astonished (and apparently also wrong). I would never have suspected that a VM would present the underlying hardware's SLIC table to the OEM key validation process.

[Fintan]

I did this in September of last year

[SteveRiley]

Let us know what happens 120 days from now. If you don't receive a warning that your license requires re-validation, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

[Fintan]

Just my 2cents worth. I did it with my preinstalled win 7 on my laptop and the windows key on the backside of the laptop.

read this:
http://www.petri.co.il/virtual_conve..._converter.htm

be sure to get the latest version: (version 5.0)
https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/e...er?p=converter

You will need a vmware account.

Install vmplayer and use the converted win 7 as your guest.

Just to be comlete: I you want to use vbox read this:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuMagazi...Qemu_+_VdiTool

Personally I don't like Oracle at all so I stick with vmplayer, but as I said that is personal.

enjoy

[SteveRiley]

I was able to do that with my wife's XP laptop installation.

Windows XP was far more forgiving of such manipulation than is Windows 7.

[wmrobins]

I was able to do that with my wife's XP laptop installation. FIrst I used dd to save the drive as an ISO. Then I installed the ISO into virtual box on Kubuntu. (I don't remeber how (it was two or three years ago) but I beleive it was covered in the virtual box documentation. At that point, I booted without issues. No Re-Activation was needed. I can't say it saved my marrige.... well, yes I can!

[jlittle]

Thank you.:roll:

...Why does the world use Windows? (-_-?)...

[SteveRiley]

OEM license keys can't be used to activate retail Windows. So the "Windows downloaded from the Internet" is an ISO that contains an OEM build.

A hash of the license key on your sticker is stored in a data structure called the SLIC table, which lives your computer's BIOS. If Windows detects that the stored hash doesn't correspond with the license key used during installation, it will eventually refuse to boot.

It's becoming increasingly challenging to obtain a replacement sticker if your original one got damaged. A good habit is to write it down when you first purchased the PC. It probably comes as no surprise that you can always active any kind of Windows with a (purchased) retail key; an OEM build activated with a retail key ignores the fact that the hash in the BIOS no longer matches the key.

Virtualizing an OEM install, activated with an OEM key, is truly a risky thing to do. I'm actually suprised it would work at all. I suspect that this instance would start to complain about licensing issues after 120 days. You can follow some interesting tricks to extend this, but you should expect none of them to remain permanent.

[jlittle]

If you have a valid key for Windows, you can do a fresh installation inside your virtual machine using any disk image downloaded from the internet. It just have to be the same version as the one you have the key for (like Home Premium or Ultimate) and maybe you need to do a phone activation at the end.

Ah... that would be the way. Thank you.

[zzzleepy]

If you have a valid key for Windows, you can do a fresh installation inside your virtual machine using any disk image downloaded from the internet. It just have to be the same version as the one you have the key for (like Home Premium or Ultimate) and maybe you need to do a phone activation at the end. I have a Toshiba laptop which came with Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit preinstalled and backup disks only for the 32bit version. The 64bit version was stored inside a partition on my hard disk and I had to use a utility called "Startup Disk Creator" (or something similar) to create backup disks for the 64bit version. But these backup disks were not normal installation disks for Windows and if I used them to restore my installation, I would again get hundreds all those useless crap from Toshiba.

So, I decided to download a dvd image for Home Premium 64bit from the internet, wiped the whole disk (getting rid of the useless crap) and did a clean install with my serial number.

Of course, that was before Linux...