That’s basically what I did. I think I’ll just nuke it though, haven’t booted it up in months.
As your OS’s are on different SSD’s it would be very simple to virtualise Windows 10 by passing through your whole Windows drive as a Virtio device.
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also that’s strange about the licence key… I was expecting that problem when I set my Windows VM up, but to my surprise, it just worked.
I’ve even booted it on bare metal since virtualisng it and it didn’t complain.
May I ask what version of Windows 10 you own?
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.
If I understand your question, you’re trying to convert a hard drive installation to a virtual machine?
Several people make tools for this, from what I understand, including Microsoft.
I would use Microsoft’s tool to convert it to a Hyper-V/VMware image, and then use RedHats tool to convert it to KVM.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn873998(v=ws.11).aspx
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.
just crack it that’s what I do
I like trilogy 4.2 it’s a bit outdated but it works and I know what it’s doing
AFAIK on UEFI installations part of the data used to verify your windows activation is stored as part of the EFI / acpi tables.
See SLIC and MSDM table. So one would have to clone the relevant parameters into the virtual machine to fool windows 10’s activation.
See below for an idea of what’s going on.
It might work for you:
https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?298236-Libvirt-Fedora-20-Windows-8-1-OEM-UEFI-Oh-My!
Not quite, I would like to keep the windows drive bootable. At the same time, I would like to use that drive to boot the OS as a VM inside of Linux.
Can you not paasthrough the Hard Drive via IOMMU?
I believe Wendell did that during his ~3 hour stream of passthrough
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.
hmm, I will have the check that video out
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.
See this link.
https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?298236-Libvirt-Fedora-20-Windows-8-1-OEM-UEFI-Oh-My
Read it. Understand it. It covers everything about this.
ahh, ok. thanks for the clarification.
Couldn’t @Sp3cter just download Windows 10 ISO from the Microsoft web site?
When I decided to give Windows 10 a try I followed the instructions in this video and it just worked. I have been running Windows 10 on a Virtual Machine for about 6 months, and haven’t had any problems with it not being activiated.
absolutely, you are 100% correct.
I totally forgot about it.
in fact yes you can get the win10 ISO and instal it.
it will run fine without activation too, BUT there are some small limitations and annoying little things here and there that may get on your nerves.
Ya I know it has some limitations like you can’t remove any of the included Windows apps, but if you had an activated version of Windows 10, Microsoft is going to force the reinstall of its apps anyway, so I don’t see running it as unactivated as a limitation. Can’t customize Windows 10 setting if it isn’t activated, and you have a watermark on the bottom right of your screen reminding you to activate Windows 10. In my humble opinion, these Limitations are worth it to me. The ability to have Windows 10 without having to pay for it has made it possible for me to run several experiments with virtualization, which if I had to purchase a license each time I ran an experiment would get very expensive real quick.