"Flagging" Win7/8 keys for Win10 upgrade via VM

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omsion

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Anyone have any experience with this? I'm not planning on upgrading anytime soon, but today I spent some time running my Win7/8 keys through a clean install of Win10 in a VM (well, first one clean, the others I used the "Change Product Key" function in Win10, which did return succesful activations).

Does this work for enabling their use in future installs of Win10? Requiring a call due to hardware change is acceptable too
 
Try installing another Win10 in another VM and see if it auto activates.
Don't use a key when you install.
 
Don't upgrade keys only activate on the same physical motherboard as they were upgraded on?
 
I did one upgrade on a VM. Not sure what they actually use for the activation with virtual hardware. Would be easy to spin up a clean install and see if it activates.
 
omsion said:
Anyone have any experience with this? I'm not planning on upgrading anytime soon, but today I spent some time running my Win7/8 keys through a clean install of Win10 in a VM (well, first one clean, the others I used the "Change Product Key" function in Win10, which did return succesful activations).

Does this work for enabling their use in future installs of Win10? Requiring a call due to hardware change is acceptable too
Click to expand...
Microsoft has never shared how their activation system works. All we really know is it's tied to the computer and Microsoft considers the motherboard to be the computer. It is unknown if any part of the product key is used in the certificate generated when you successfully activate.

What I do know is that activating in a VM is probably a total waste of time because the activation is in fact tied to hardware. When you go to reinstall 10 on a new computer and try to use a 7 or 8 product key, the activation will fail and you will have to call Microsoft. If you have to do that, there's no time saved by activating a head of time since there is no evidence, and it is totally unknown, if the keys are recorded as activated on 10. As far as we know Microsoft simply saves a digital certificate showing activation and whether or not they can reverse that process to see what system/key was used is again unknown. It's probably some type of PKI.
 
Zepher said:
Try installing another Win10 in another VM and see if it auto activates.
Don't use a key when you install.
Click to expand...
No auto activation from this. Not sure if good thing? Does activate on insertion of key though.

Sp33dFr33k said:
I did one upgrade on a VM. Not sure what they actually use for the activation with virtual hardware. Would be easy to spin up a clean install and see if it activates.
Click to expand...
Yep, definitely would do this if I had a spare HDD around to throw it on.
 
bigdogchris said:
Microsoft has never shared how their activation system works. All we really know is it's tied to the computer and Microsoft considers the motherboard to be the computer. It is unknown if any part of the product key is used in the certificate generated when you successfully activate.
Click to expand...

From "inside sources" that I know at Microsoft and have known for 30+ years (a few high school and even a few college folks too) the activation info works basically like this:

Each computer is made up of various parts of hardware, from the motherboard (which itself is a mish-mash of various components and technologies), the CPU, the RAM, the storage, the sound card (long ago it was actually a separate card, nowadays it's typically integrated into the motherboard circuitry but some add-on cards do still exist), video cards/GPUs, and so on. Each component in a modern personal computer has two fairly unique device IDs: the vendor ID and the device ID which allow for the operating system to know "Ok, this device from this vendor is part of this computer, we need a driver for it so the operating system can allow applications/programs to make use of this hardware since the operating system is technically the "middle man" in the situation overall..." or something close to that.

The activation hash is created from the vendor and device IDs of various components in a personal computer along with the date/time of the activation along with a random number tied together with the actual Product Key in an algorithm that spits out a 50 digit UID which itself becomes the activation hash. Theoretically it's completely unique given the sheer number of diigts in the UID (50 digits is quite a large number) but it's even greater because the UID can contain alphabetic characters as well so, that's like 36 (26 letters and 10 numbers to the 50th power so, quite a feat if two machines ever happened to have the same activation hash - in fact, if you could use the same exact Product Key on the same configuration to get an activation hash they'd still be unique both times because of the date/time and random number integration.

Long story short:

The Product Key is part of the mathematical computation that generates the eventual UID that becomes the activation hash of an individual machine. Now, as to how Microsoft's particular methodology knows when something like a CPU or a GPU or RAM or a sound card or some other component has been replaced and doesn't trigger the need to re-activate whereas swapping out a motherboard almost guarantees such a requirement is unknown and not information I've been able to glean from any of those friends since Windows XP came out which is when this particular product activation scheme kicked into high gear many years ago.

As for the OP's question of activating Windows 7/8/8.1 keys for Windows 10 use inside a virtual machine I'm pretty sure at some point they're going to have a problem with later activations because of what I just stated - modern virtual machine software like VMware, VirtualBox, QEMU, and others including the native support for virtualization in Windows in some versions (Hyper-V) is/are well known to Microsoft and factored into the licensing - they know if you activated inside a virtual machine or not. Since the Retail licensing does allow for transfer of a license one would think that means you can do exactly what the OP did (and I even suggested attempted in a thread recently but instead of using VMs I was saying using the physical hardware and just make an image of the installation pre-activation, use it once with one key to activate, restore the image, do it again with another key, and so on to lock in the Windows 10 free upgrade offer) may prove fruitless depending on what Microsoft wants to do.

As noted many times over, it's their OS, they will eventually do whatever they want with it which could including causing issues with activation for people that have done such things. Remember that even with a virtualized OS there is still going to be some of the bare metal hardware information coming through which provides the device and vendor IDs which are part of the activation hash computation.

The OP will find out as time passes, I suppose, but I myself won't put any serious faith in the solution being a long term one. On bare metal hardware as I just mentioned, with Retail class keys, and using the image/activate/restore method I can see that working without any problems, but on a virtualized platform not so much.
 
Tiberian spelled it out perfectly. I use a KMS server uses the AD generated SID to create unique trackers for licensing. Same principal as above.
 
A week or two ago I upgraded a VM (using VMware workstation 11) from Windows 7 pro to Windows 10 pro.

Today I did a clean install on a new VM. After install I got two messages:
"unable to contact activation servers" and "there's no digital entitlement for this PC". So additional VMs on the same hardware do not activate (at least in my case).
 
Thanks for the detailed write-up Tiberian.

We'll have to see what happens when I do get around to installing one on physical hardware in a few weeks, but sounds like I'll have to stick with the older Windows, which isn't too big a deal yet, at least.
 
MS has a Windows 10 Pro VM disk image with a 90 day run time. I saw it when I was watching videos on unRAID on how to convert a VMware image to work with unRAID.

 
Sp33dFr33k said:
A week or two ago I upgraded a VM (using VMware workstation 11) from Windows 7 pro to Windows 10 pro.

Today I did a clean install on a new VM. After install I got two messages:
"unable to contact activation servers" and "there's no digital entitlement for this PC". So additional VMs on the same hardware do not activate (at least in my case).
Click to expand...
Try 'bridging' for your network instead of 'NAT'. I had problems using NAT.
 
Sp33dFr33k said:
A week or two ago I upgraded a VM (using VMware workstation 11) from Windows 7 pro to Windows 10 pro.

Today I did a clean install on a new VM. After install I got two messages:
"unable to contact activation servers" and "there's no digital entitlement for this PC". So additional VMs on the same hardware do not activate (at least in my case).
Click to expand...
Did you create a "virtual switch? first? You need only one such switch for all the Hyper-VMs.
 
x509 said:
Did you create a "virtual switch? first? You need only one such switch for all the Hyper-VMs.
Click to expand...

I'm using VMware not hyper-v. Networking isn't the issue. I'm able to run Windows update just fine and can get to the internet.
 
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