Hide the fact that a guest is in a VM?

[TheLQ]

I am running Windows XP Guest in a Windows 7 Host. I am trying to make XP believe that it IS a physical machine and not a VM.

Now the first mistake was that this is an existing virtual machine that already has Guest Additions installed. I know that might be the problem but if I get a clean vanilla XP image, will software running in XP still believe or be able to detect that its running in a VM?

[Perryg]

More than likely they will.

[TheLQ]

More than likely they will.

How? Is there anything else I can do to limit it?

And isn't the purpose of VM software to make the guest believe that its a physical machine?

[Perryg]

No and No.

Unless the programmer is ignorant when it comes to virtual machines they will be able to detect. More than likely any attempt to work around this would break your license to use the software anyway. They do it for a reason.

The purpose is to allow running another operating system on the same hardware.

[mpack]

How?

How to detect a virtual machine:

1. Obvious: presence of devices that identify themselves as virtual, e.g. "VBOX HARD DISK".
2. Inference: presence of devices such as network, graphics cards and IDE hdds, which are long obsolete in the real world. Similarly the absence of features such as IO APIC, long part of the WinPC standard. A small chance of a false positive here, but not enough to care about.
3. Direct: you can time certain activities. Weird timings for what ought to be standard ops is a clear indication of a VM.

With access to the VBox source codes and a lot of effort you can maybe do something about 1 and 2. 3 still gets you.

Hence: if the programmer is halfway decent, and is determined to detect a VM, then he will.

[ElGuapo]

I tried to search the entire forum and find discussion about hiding VM, only this and another topic talking about some game..
So there isn't any .ini files one could edit to isolate the VM and prevent the applications running in there seeing they're in VM?
I know these kinda features do exist in your rival, vmware, but I'd like to keep on using vbox since i like it.

Someone from Oracle's (?) team did reply to one person in this forum that there is ways, but he wouldn't tell cause
"it might be illegal" ?
What?
There is nothing illegal about it.
For example, I have several PAID software/games which I legally own, and a fact what makes me upset is, the program's
refuse to run in VM (well, in VirtualBox,cause they can see it).
Most of the time, it's because the protection used in the software, and the author of the software has set "flags" in the protection to
prevent the software from running in a Virtual Machine..

So, I'd like an answer if there exits some "hidden/ondocumented" settings in VirtualBox to hide it's presence, instead of you
telling "it's illegal".
Yes/No will do.
Thank you.
If they don't exist by default (like in vmware), I guess one has to code it's own little "plugin" to do the hiding.
It is possible,and I do know most of the stuff what all these "protections" which prevent you from running the software in the VM looks for.
But instead of bothering myself for hours of work, I'd like an answer if these features are already in VirtualBox,but hidden in somewhere.. ?

[Martin]

There are so many possibilities to recognize that a guest is running in a VM, be it just the VBox hardware devices like the disk or graphics adaptor.
I don't think there is a way to completely disguise every way to detect the virtualization.

[mpack]

@ElGuapo - did you bother to read the above thread at all? Far from your characterization, this thread barely touched on the legalities. E.g. I listed a number of purely practical issues in my message above, none of them legal or contractual. Which of those items was unclear?

A VM cannot be hidden, it isn't a question of a new setting. What did you imagine such a setting would do anyway?