Windows 10: V2P Tutorial needed!!

Thank you Kari for your assistance. I think I now have all information to begin the process.

Have not tried it on a Win-7 machine but on a Win-10 with VMWare Workstation, I see that I do get the option of creating VM either with legacy BIOS or EFI.

From VMware manual:
"Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is replacing BIOS as a technology that newer computers and operatingsystems use to boot computers. EFI is sometimes referred to as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
(UEFI)."








Thanks again for your assistance.

 

Hello Kari,

While creating rescue media in Macrium Reflect on a Win-7 Host, after selecting Win-10 as PE, I get the following dialog box that indicates that rescue media has the drivers associated with host machine. Is that going to be a problem later on?

Thanks,

 

No, that's not a problem. Rescue media with Macrium, it tries to add all available drivers for that hardware you are using when creating it. Those drivers will then help the Rescue media to connect to network and possible external storage media.

However, as you will only need the Rescue ISO and / or USB to boot machines in order to create an image, those drivers will do no harm on whatever machine, physical or virtual, you will use it.

 

Hi there
Just one final point here

A VMWARE VM can have a UEFI or MBR (standard) boot whether or not the physical machine has UEFI capability.
If you create a VMware image with a UEFI boot you won't be able to create a physical machine (V2P) from the virtual machine if the physical machine isn't UEFI enabled.

Creating a VM from the physical machine (P2V) doesn't matter --just change the options in the VM's config settings.

Note Macrium is excellent at cloning / restoring images - even to machines with different hardware. The resulting Windows (physical) is usually bootable and on the rare cases where it doesn't a repair system from the windows ISO works fine.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Interesting. So one can create a EFI VM with legacy host and there'd be no issues while creating a physical machine (w/UEFI enabled)?

 

Hi there
That's the point of VM's - you can do things like that

On an old PC with virtualisation in the CPU enabled (all new cpu's are by default) I ran W7 X64 and even W10 X-64 on XP !!!! (32 bit).

Of course the XP system could only access 4GB memory so Host + VM together could only have a max combined RAM of 4GB but it was an interesting exercise running a 64 bit guest OS on XP. !!!

Cheers
jimbo

 

Kari - Thanks for your assistance in this. I was able to create Win-10 images for my set of retail Win-7 licenses. Hopefully I'll be able to restore images to physical machines in the next couple of months when I'll be getting some new machines.

 

You are wecome *Smile

Don't forget us, come back to tell how it went after doing first physical machine.

 

Will definitely do that.

 

Hello Kari,

Am about to install the image on a new laptop that I have and as promised I've some to also inform you about this.

Was wondering how would i go about moving user folders to another partition while installing from this image since I did not do that while installing the OS the first time.

Can I still move the users folder as if I'm installing the OS for the first time OR do I need to go through the route of moving the users folder (while creating a dummy account that can be deleted later) on existing OS?

Thanks for your assistance

 

Maybe I got confused by the various replies but it seems to me a key point was missed long ago.

"I have a few "retail" Win-7 licenses that I need to upgrade to Win-10 before Microsoft yanks free upgrade.

Was looking at creating VMs with Win-7, upgrading these VMs to Win-10 and then use V2P to move these VMs to physical boxes".

Windows 7 keys are not converted to windows 10 keys. You would get a digital licence for each vm. If you sysprep etc the install to move to a physical machine, the install will not activate. Additionally the new trouble shooter that does enable digital licence transfer does not allow transfer of digital licences between a vm and a physical machine.

So if the intent is still to do the text in bold, it will not work.

 

Are you saying that Win-7 retail licenses used to install Win-10 does NOT allow users to move Windows to another PC? That was the basis of the whole exercise.

Per Kari's post (#6 of this thread), one can, if one has Win-7 retail key, move the OS to another machine and that might need a call to MS for activation. Hopefully others can share their thoughts and/or experiences on this.

 

Please notice that the post of mine you are referring to was posted on July 19th when we still had almost two weeks to go until the official end of Microsoft's free upgrade offer. This offer made it possible for users to activate a clean installed Windows 10 with a valid Windows 7 or 8.1 product key.

Anyway, even after the free upgrade offer the difference between an OEM and retail licenses remains the same: OEM is not transferable, whereas a retail license is. Since Windows 10 version 1607 (build 14393, insiders already from build 14371) there has been a new, easier method to transfer a Windows 10 retail license with Activation Troubleshooter, making phone activation mentioned in referred post in most cases unnecessary. See tutorial: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html

 

The subtle point in all this is that the activation troubleshooter does not allow transfer of digital licences between physical machines and vms - try it and you will see it refuses to let you do that. Interestingly it does not matter if licence is in vmware or hyper-v for example - they will transfer.

I do not know why it has this restriction. I suspect it was to prevent exactly what OP is trying to do ie to stop "dealers" holding on to lots of keys to upgrade en masse using vms as a loophole.

 

I didn't know that, thanks for clarifying it.