To use Windows 7 OEM as a Qubes VM; which hardware metadata is needed?

[Teqleez Motley]

Hi all,

One of my old laptops have Windows 7, and I would like to use that license for a Qubes (H)VM.

I have one question and one related concern:

a) which metadata is needed for that OEM to continue believing that it is the master OS and running on the "same" hardware as initially set up with?

b) That particular laptop has almost no battery left, and no available power supply..:
In case that laptop just have a minute or two left of battery, and I do not want to "test" if that is true..., I am looking for a way to fetch the needed metadata mentioned in a) with a script, to store it to a USB immediately ASAP after booting.

Obviously I dont need the Qubes OS itself to actually DO this, but would like to know if I can hope to achieve this at all.
Any tips/pointers would be much appreciated.

Regards,
Teqleez

[Teqleez Motley]

(Btw, I do of course have the license key, and I am NOT going to use that VM online, so I do hopefully not need security updates or the like.)


Regards,
Teqleez

[Stuart Perkins]

In that case, I would consider pulling the hard drive and using usb adapter to access the information without concern for battery life. This is independent of whether or not you can cause the VM to think it is the original hardware..which I actually doubt at this point.

Stuart

[Teqleez Motley]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018, at 18:40, Stuart Perkins wrote:
> In that case, I would consider pulling the hard drive and using usb
> adapter to access the information without concern for battery life.

Hm, I thought that in order to get such metadata out, one would have to access the BIOS/hardware info directly?
For example, the serial number or the like of the motherboard, graphics card, etc.
The hard drive of that laptop is long gone (reused), no Windows installation left.
I just have the licence key, and hopefully the possibility to get to the hardware serial numbers, etc. via some tool...

Regards,
Teqleez

[Stuart Perkins]

Ah, I see what you are after. I doubt an OEM licensed Windows can be used on a different piece of hardware, but it is worth a shot. You may be stuck buying a "license". I run Win-7 by downloading the VBox VM from "modern.ie" for IE11/Win7. it is only 32 bit (so no Qubes Windows tools), but it can be re-armed 5 times for 90 days each plus initial activation for 540 days before having to start over. I have a bulk licensed version of XP and the registry hack to get security updates until June of 2019 as well...also 32 bit though.

Someone may have hacked the Windblows registry for those things...not sure where to find that information though...such a hack would let you update the registry to match the new "hardware", but I've never hacked that deep into it. :)

Stuart

[Teqleez Motley]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2018, at 15:24, Stuart Perkins wrote:
> Ah, I see what you are after. I doubt an OEM licensed Windows can be
> used on a different piece of hardware, but it is worth a shot. You may
> be stuck buying a "license".

Right. I also have XP licence(s), and get what I need running there and also mostly through (LInux) Wine, so I am basically just curious to know if a OEM version could be made to work on a permanent basis beyond the 90 days. Just to know and be able to help others getting such things working also under Qubes. Sometimes all that is missing and preventing moving to Linux/Qubes is a printer driver for specific hardware (scanners, faxes, etc., and for example accounting systems and the like.

Regards,
Teqleez

[trueriver]

On Wednesday, 25 April 2018 22:39:43 UTC+1, @LeeteqXV wrote:

>
> ... I am basically just curious to know if a OEM version could be made to work on a permanent basis beyond the 90 days.

No legally.

The problem you have is that Xen (on which Qubes is based) is not a virtual machine despite our use of that term, it is paravirtual or some such. That means that some aspects of the real hardware underneath are visible to the virtual machine. The most important is the CPU - your VM will always report the true CPU when asked, and that would break any attempt to run Windows in a Qube on any other hardware.

Trying to run a Win VM within Qubes on the exact hardware the OEN license was issued for comes up against a different problem. The CPU matches, but things like the make/model of network cards will now be different the disks and network interfaces are Xen specific virtual hardware that does not exist in the real world. As we do not know exactly what Windows uses to build its fingerprints, it is almost impossible to capture everything.

To do what you are trying, you would need to use an emulator rather than a hypervisor. QVM without the KVM extensions would in principle do, but then you would also have to write the code to emulate every piece of hardware in your computer. (If you ever used QVM you will have noticed that the range of virtual hardware it emulates is very restricted). Even if you got it working it would run slow.

With a non-OEM license, the solution is to phone Microsoft and explain hnestly what you are trying to do and they will usually allow you to transfer your license from the real hardware to the virtual (or if you had a three-PC license, to count the virtual machine as another license). It would still notice if you moved to another qubes machine hosted with a noticeably different CPU, as explained above.

[trueriver]

On Thursday, 26 April 2018 10:15:01 UTC+1, trueriver wrote:

Correction

> To do what you are trying, you would need to use an emulator rather than a hypervisor. QVM without the KVM extensions would in principle do, but then you would also have to write the code to emulate every piece of hardware in your computer. (If you ever used QVM you will have noticed that the range of virtual hardware it emulates is very restricted). Even if you got it working it would run slow.

> ...

for QVM read QEMU in this paragraph.