Windows 10: Copying W10 VM's - choose I MOVED It solves activation issue (VMware)

Hi there

Just reminding people of a tip I got from this FORUM (can't remember who it was but thanks !!) that if you want to copy a W10 VM to another device / machine and it already has been activated with a digital license then when powering on the VM in VMware (workstation or Player) choose I moved in the popup box instead of the recommended one I copied it. This will preserve the activation and avoid all sorts of hassles -- I'm always moving VM's around from SSD's to HDD's and back again as I test a few things.

Cheers
jimbo

:)

 

Physical-to-Virtual Windows 10 Activation Problem in VMware Player (Troubleshooting)

Windows 10 was activated when I first reinstalled it in a VMware Workstation Player 14 Virtual Machine and installed the VMware Tools for Windows, but now only a couple-few days after the installation
it is no longer activated. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the VMware Tools and it still will not reactivate. I tried repairing the VMware Tools installation and get an error during the install.
I have also tried the Windows 10 Activation Troubleshooter tool, but it did not solve this issue; didn't work. I have already gone to the VMware community for help with this problem, and I learned
that I may have inadvertently and accidentally caused this problem myself by choosing that the Virtual Machine had been COPIED rather than MOVED when prompted with the question "Did you move or copy
your virtual machine?" and that this may be what caused the problem.



Please note that this is a copy of Windows 10 that was obtained for free a year or two ago when Microsoft was allowing users of Windows 7 or 8 to upgrade to Windows 10 for free, and was already previously
activated on this same physical machine as a host operating system, but I have now decided to switch over and run Windows as a guest operating system using Linux as the host. I shouldn't need a product key to activate this copy of Windows 10, I would think,
and shouldn't be charged any money for this mistake, but I'm not sure what to do in this situation. What are the likely causes of this problem and what might be a solution? Please help! Thank you
for your time and attention.

 

Turn off custom scaling and sign out - problem

This might help anyone running Windows on a VM.

I had the same issues for Win10 on Parallels for Mac.

I switched off the "Best for Retina Display" and choose "Scaled" instead. That allowed me to decouple the Microsoft settings from the VM overrides. A similar setting might exist on VmWare?