Question about Virtual Machine systems

[Craig White]

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.

Craig