Boot physical hard drive in virtual machine? @ AskWoody (2024)

October 12, 2019 at 8:58 pm #1979893

The Windows almost certainly will deactivate when it recognizes the different hardware of the VM. It won’t prevent you from using it, though. When Windows is not activated, it just turns the desktop wallpaper black, puts a “This Windows is not genuine” watermark in the corner of the desktop, and nags you periodically to activate. It won’t let you use the customization options to change back the wallpaper, colors, or theme, but otherwise, everything works.

Are you planning to reinstall everything on the Windows in the new computer, or to move the drive over? Your concern over the activation state of the old Windows suggests that you’re thinking of moving the drive with everything still intact. If it was an OEM Windows that had been user-installed, it would possibly deactivate even if it was on another PC of the same model. Microsoft has not revealed much about how the hardware fingerprinting process that determines whether or not it’s the same PC as when Windows was first activated, but it’s known to look at a bunch of things in the hardware, some of which will change even on the same model of PC. The MAC address or addresses of networking devices would be different, as would be the serial number of the PC is stored in the UEFI, as is the norm with computers recently. Sometimes the same PC model may have other hardware component changes, like a new revision to a motherboard, which will be enough to let the activation program know that a change has occurred.

Like Indoda, though, my experience with this type of thing does not involve Windows 10, which has an all-new way of handling activation through digital entitlements. How it will handle this is a very good question. If it doesn’t recognize that it is a different PC (meaning that it decides to keep the old activation), you should be in good shape. I have no idea what the odds are of that, but if you use the disk from a VM before swapping it to the new PC when it arrives, it will be starting from an already deactivated state. What that means… I don’t know, but my gut tells me the odds of it working favorably would be less that way than if the Windows was unchanged.

For this reason, you may wish to make a virtual hard drive (VHD) copy of the physical drive, and use that virtual hard drive in the VM, using Microsoft’s Sysinternals tool for that purpose, as Paul T has suggested in another thread on this site. Windows will most likely deactivate the virtual version in the VM, but the real hard drive will still be in the fully activated state. What will happen as Windows phones home with the deactivation from the VM, I have no idea. I haven’t tried this kind of thing with 10, and it’s all new compared to older versions of Windows.

If Windows does not accept the old hard drive with the new computer combo, it would then deactivate Windows… and what comes next, I am not sure. Since the new PC will presumably come with a Windows license tied to that machine, maybe it will sense that and reactivate Windows with no muss and no fuss (assuming it’s the same version of Windows as before, Home or Pro). Or maybe it will do something else. If it directs you to call Microsoft and type a code into the PC, you can do that (I have no idea if this still happens with 10; it was still a thing as of 7 SP1), and if it works, you’re set. If you have to talk to an agent, make sure you mention that this was a repair, not an upgrade. OEM licenses can be reactivated (if Microsoft wants to) on PCs that have different hardware because of repair due to hardware failure, but not because of upgrade. I’ve had to do this with Windows 7, and it worked fine, but that was not 10, of course.

Sorry that there are so many questions about what will happen, but MS has changed the rules of the game more times than I can keep up with (and I’m not gaining any new experience with 10, as I’ve gotten off of the Windows train).

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