virtualbox.org

Hi,

As the title says, I am looking to migrate a physical machine to a VM and retain any identifiers for a licensed app. I have a paid-for, legitimate copy of a program…I’ll call it Program X. It was downloaded as a trial and generated a unique computer id. When I paid for Program X’s license I submitted the computer ID and was given a registration key that must be placed in Program X’s installation folder to use the program in all its glory.

Before the holidays my mother board died. I built a new computer (mobo, cpu, & ram). I installed the existing hard drive and, to my surprise, the computer booted up fine (Windows 7 Premium). More shockingly, even the computer ID generated by Program X was intact and Program X functioned as needed. However, due to other operating system errors, I had to re-install Windows 7, as well as Program X. Only this time, the computer ID generated by Program X was completely different. I was able to contact the makers of Program X and they kindly generated a new registration key for me (I was still within their maintenance/warranty period).

This got me to thinking that I should have registered Program X with a computer ID from a virtual machine so that I would never need to worry about a physical machine dying again. Oh well, too late now!

However, I have Macrium Reflect images of the old computer. I have successfully made virtual machines from the images by using Disk2VHD, converting the image to a VHD with Macrium’s built-in converter, and by restoring the image with the Macrium rescue disc. All variants of my VMs work perfectly as the original physical machine EXCEPT Program X reports a different computer ID, and thus, does not work on the virtual machines.

Does anyone have any suggestions to migrate the physical machine to a virtual machine and keep every identifier intact? I am not so concerned about needing to reactivate Windows, and don’t believe the Windows Product ID to register windows plays a factor in generating the computer ID for Program X anyway. When I reinstalled W7, the computer ID generated by Program X was the same both before and after activating W7 with my product ID.

I’ve been experimenting for over a week now with no happy results. If it’s not possible , then it’s not possible…but something tells me this can be done.

Sorry this was long...thanks for reading (and hopefully helping),

Assuming we are talking generically...

There's no way to know what "computer ID" an app uses. Each app has its own way of calculating a hardware signature, and more modern apps will use stronger signatures. It may include the 32bit hard disk sig, a 16 byte disk UUID, network MAC address, exact processor type, NIC type, RAM size, disk size, etc etc. If you can think of something measureable in software about your PC, someone could include that in a signature.

If it's a really old app then it might get fooled by moving a disk image between PCs (which is all a P2V is). IMO the programmer of any modern app would have to be pretty ignorant or incompetent to be so easily fooled. It's also easy to detect that you're running in a VM, and some software will straight out refuse to do so.

Thanks for the reply even though it's not the one I wanted

I kind of figured that's how this quest would end up.