virtualbox.org

Good morning.
I'm trying to track down what might be causing this issue to happen.
What I have is a dual boot system running windows 10 and Arch Linux. I have a Guest windows 10 setup and running. I share this VM between Hosts. Both hosts are using the same version of VirtualBox...currently as of this post, version 5.2.
I initially set the guest up on the windows host and activated it. When I boot into the Linux Host and start the guest, Windows becomes deactivated. Now I thought being a virtual environment, windows would be none the wiser, but it seems it is wise indeed.

I have removed the virtualbox additions as well thinking maybe somehow between Hosts this was changing things inside the guest. I have set the .vbox files to be identical with the exception of the path location differences between windows and linux. I did a system information dump of the guest when booted in both hosts to attempt to compare the difference and see if I can spot what changed causing the guest to become deactivated. Attached are both system information dumps if anyone is interested. Im just trying to track down anything that might be different between Guests, it seems according to the system info dumps that everything is the same.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

That is odd. Do the Windows and Linux machines have different processors (eg Intel and AMD)?

If you're going to ask a question about a Windows guest, I think it would be a great if you asked it in the "Windows Guests" forum. I'll move the topic there now.

lostandconfused wrote:I share this VM between Hosts.

How, precisely? Hopefully not by moving a VDI between two separately created VMs.

Besides noticing that the motherboard signatures are different (separately created VMs), a Win10 guest can also see other aspects of physical world, for example the CPU ID, CPU capabilites, OpenGL vendor, network neighborhood and network time. Plus Win10 is definitely young enough that Microsoft clearly knows how to detect and identify virtual environments. If I wanted a guest OS that was relaxed about being moved between hosts, Win10 wouldn't have been my first choice!

Been there ... kind of ... done that! I have a dual boot where I sometimes boot into the windows partition but most of the time I use that very same partition as a VM under Linux.

There is a long discussion of this as a sticky thread at the top of the Windows Guest forum called Discuss: HOWTO: Windows 7: In both VM and native. Yes, it is Win 7, but there are relevant things about Win 10 also.

If you want to read my thread on it, here you go.
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=84375

Bottom line ... you have to call Micro$oft to get them to activate it for you. It knows that it is not the same exact machine. I tried and tried to trick it using setextradata, but it still wasn't happy enough to activate. If you don't want to call them, just wait it out. It took about 9 months for me, but Windows finally agreed to authorize the virtual machine. I can still boot to native Windows and it stayed activated.