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You can with FOSS OSes, but it's fragile. If an OS thinks it's got sole control of the boot sector, say -- because sometimes it does -- and it tries to modify i

You can with FOSS OSes, but it's fragile. If an OS thinks it's got sole control of the boot sector, say -- because sometimes it does -- and it tries to modify it when it's in a VM, at best the VM breaks and at worst the whole system breaks. Summary: possible, but not recommended. But Windows fingerprints the hardware and a copy activated against the host isn't activated when in a VM, and vice versa. So this doesn't work.

simonblack 3y ago
But Windows fingerprints the hardware and a copy activated against the host isn't activated when in a VM, and vice versa. So this doesn't work. FWIW, I took a raw image of a 'real' Win 7 system after I had reduced the size of the C: drive down to about 50 gig. I then converted it to a virtualbox .VDI and that worked very well. I later just installed a copy of my version of Windows 7 on a standard virtualbox system and used my own serial. That worked even better. It complains that it's not a validated system, but otherwise works normally. I suppose I have to get some return for those unused Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems I own. (Every month or two, I boot them up just to run the Windows updates. I don't know why I bother to do this. It's really just a waste of time.)