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Old 07-26-2025, 06:34 AM   #38
Quoth
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB View Post
Though I spend most of career dealing with Microsoft's volume licensing, in my experience, manufacturer Windows 8.1+ OEM OS licenses are tied to the hardware with a key stored in the BIOS. Moving the hard drive to a new computer will require re-licensing. You can get the key from the BIOS using a PowerShell admin session and entering "wmic path SoftwareLicensingService get OA3xOriginalProductKey" on the command line.
Or even with a simple console command booting from a Linux Live USB.

It depends on the maker/key if that key works for a VM. Also some windows 7 PCs have actually a Win10 key in the bios and the Win7 encrypted in the registry (utilities on Windows can extract that).

See also
Disk2vhd - Sysinternals | Microsoft Learn

Works at least for XP, Win2003, Vista and Win7, even on a PC with a UEFI BIOS as long as Windows was installed using "legacy boot".
Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk).
With the right settings that will work on a VM on Linux
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