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I have a bunch of Dell machines that came with BIOS-injected Windows 7 licenses. They have all been upgraded to Windows 10 and now show as having a valid "digital entitlement" license.

These are powerful machines that are normally booted into Ubuntu (dual-boot) as development environments.

We have a corporate Active Directory and I'd like to have the machines run a Windows VM on Virtualbox so they can be domain joined and easily access the Windows managed network resources when they need to. Physically rebooting the whole machine into Windows is too painful as it requires my devs shutting down all their other development VMs and effectively interrupting all their other work.

Is there any way I can use the valid Windows license (in the BIOS) that these machines have within a VM? I should mention that my devs aren't interested in having Windows as the physical host OS.

Neobyte
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2 Answers2

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Newer versions of VirtualBox have a "BIOS passthrough" function, that when enabled allows a VirtualBox guest to access the SLIC table in the hardware BIOS where the Windows activation information is contained. If your version does not have this feature, you may need to upgrade VirtualBox.

There are other methods of manually reading the SLIC data using Linux and then inputting it back into Windows to activate as well.

See here for more info: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9231 https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=43678&p=196535&hilit=slic#p196535

ruhnet
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You should be able to create a virtual machine in the Ubuntu environment and point it to the Windows partition/disk as a passthrough or raw disk.

How to use a real partition with Windows 7 installed, in a virtualbox vm?

However, I think you may end up having activation issues and I don't believe there is any way around that.

Community
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pat o.
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