I am curious if the following is possible, I believe someone mentioned it before here on the forums but I can’t seem to find the post.
I have a linux box (Arch) on one SSD and Windows 10 on another SSD. Both drives have their own EFI sectors are are able to boot independantly of each other. Can I turn my windows drive into a kvm with hardware passthrough inside Linux and still have windows drive be able to boot outside of the hypervisor as well if I wanted to?
I have done that with the PCI passthrough stuff but windows kept complaining it wasn’t activated because it was in a virtual machine. When I booted it on bare metal it said it was activated.
Probably detects some kind of difference in the hardware if I had to guess.
This is a bit of a workaround… but you could try signing in with an MS account on bare metal, which makes your activated key attach to the account. Then sign into it in the VM, then you should be able to switch it back to a local account.
Plain old Home, I’m not paying $200+ for something I only boot up one every few months. The licence only allows for one installation though, must think the virtual machine is a different computer.
It’s not strange because when you virutalize windows it doesn’t have info about the hardware like it once did, CPU’s mobo, etc.
Windows takes all the serial info about your components, and uses that as a hash and attaches it towards your license key, so if you ever have a large hardware change/upgrade (mobo replacement), then you have to reactivate windows.
Not that it doens’t do this constantly, just when you first installed it. So if you first installed it as a VM then you wouldn’t have reactivation issues.
because this is an existing install, maybe. but if you can get the license attached to a microsoft account it ought to work both ways. i don’t have experience with that personally, though.
that’s not the issue here; windows would still see different “hardware” when virtualized. though passthrough would potentially give better disk performance, once everything is working.
no, it would not.
the license is generated based on your hardware, all you do when you register/link new install with your MS account is link that machine to the account and store the generated value in the account, so if you need to reinstall the windows on the same machine you can just download the ISO, install it and when asked login with your MS account to validate the activation. you can, or at least you could in the past, move the license to another hardware but you need to contact MS for that and explain why you want to do that.
at work I run 20 MS machine and when we moved to windows 10 I had to call MS twice for that as I tried to batch clone to save time and it would not allow me to activate on several machines at once. so just said F@## and did the whole install/setup on each.
very easy using new DELL machines as they have the skus embedded into BIOS so install is a self activating on first boot.
Yeah you can do this. This is exactly how I have mine setup. The only caveat is when you switch between VM and bare metal you will get a “Setting up/Detecting new hardware” screen on boot. If your are getting license key issues with this the only suggestion I have is to get a Windows 10 Pro upgrade however that could be costly.