Question about Virtual Machine systems

[Chris Gehlker]

On Jan 13, 2008, at 12:40 PM, Craig White wrote:

> On Sun, 2008-01-13 at 12:21 -0700, Joseph Sinclair wrote:
>> All,
>>  Knowing that some of you are far more experienced with running  
>> things in a VM than I am, I would like to know if any of you have  
>> ideas for the following scenario:
>>
>>  I have a family member who is running Windows XP and the box it's  
>> on is dying fast.  Rather than buy a new
>> Windows box and attempt to, maybe, migrate everything, my thought  
>> is to take a full disk backup of the Windows
>> machine and load that into a Virtual Machine on one of my Linux  
>> systems.  This, however spawns a few questions:
>> 1) Is it possible to load a live Windows system backup into a fresh  
>> VM on a different machine like this and have it actually work?
>>  a) Is there a specific way I should take the backup to ensure an  
>> easier transition?
>>  b) Which VM software would be the best choice for this?
>>  c) Does anyone have any other suggestions to help make this as  
>> smooth as possible?
> ----
> I have no first hand knowledge of running WinXP on VM of any type.
>
> I have enough knowledge of WinXP to know that a hardware signature is
> computed during installation and this information is fed back to
> Microsoft when that particular installation code is 'authorized'. Once
> authorized, you can replace many individual elements such as the hard
> drive, but once the motherboard is factored, the 'authorized' copy
> cannot be moved to any other motherboard without authorization  
> including
> situations where the motherboard dies and is replaced with an  
> identical
> copy.
>
> This isn't an issue with the 'oem' versions that are attached to a
> computer because the computer itself has the authorization which  
> permits
> a company such as Dell to replace a defective motherboard but those
> Windows XP versions aren't available to the general public.
>
> Thus, I would expect that if you migrate the current working version  
> of
> Windows XP from the computer that was authorized to a VM run on
> different hardware, Windows will detect this at startup and go into
> unauthorized mode.

I have limited experience with VMWare. It works. There are newer and  
perhaps better solutions out there but my needs for Windows are  
limited so I haven't explored them. I used the Files and Settings  
Transfer Wizard to synch my virtual machine with my old actual machine  
and it worked. You have to install Windows from disk in order to use  
this wizard.

Windows did detect that it was on 'different hardware' and said that I  
needed to reactivate it. I called the nice lady in India. She wanted  
my assurance that I had a license for Windows that would allow me to  
move it to a different machine. Apparently some OEM copies are  
licensed to a  single machine. When I explained that I intended to  
wipe and donate my old actual machine along with an old copy of Win XP  
that I had purchased personally. I wanted to install copies of both XP  
Pro and Vista Business that I had received from MS when I was a  
student  member of MSDN under the VM. She had no problem and gave me  
activation numbers for each OS.

The bottom line is you need to assure yourself that the copy of  
Windows on the old machine is not an OEM version or you are going to  
have activation problems.
--
Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to  
those who do not wish to hear it.
-Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)