Activate the OEM license for Windows 10 Home VirtualBox guest on Ubuntu host


Nicolas Raoul

context

Three years ago, my company installed me a Lenovo T550 with Windows 10 Home (my understanding is that this is called "OEM"). I immediately deleted everything to install Ubuntu on it.

Unfortunately, from now on, I need to use Windows 10 every week for legacy reasons, but my main work is still on Ubuntu, so I'm considering running Windows 10 in Ubuntu's VirtualBox .

Lenovo recommends

Lenovo tells me that my Windows Home license is somehow linked to my hardware (firmware?) and that Windows automatically finds it. They pointed me to this page :

Installing Microsoft Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 SP1, 2012, and 2012 R2 to such a virtual machine from Lenovo OEM media will fail until the virtual BIOS has been updated to include this information. setVMBIOS.exe performs this function for servers using Microsoft Hyper-V technology.

Check with your hypervisor vendor for information on how to perform this feature on other hypervisors. The patch addresses this issue by adding Lenovo information to the virtual BIOS .

Note: The page doesn't mention Windows 10 Home, but I guess the same applies?

virtual box

How to apply Lenovo's suggestion to VirtualBox? (5.2.18)

Now, I have VirtualBox out of the box, the VM created yesterday with standard settings fails to activate:

windows suck

Windows is not activated. Windows reports that the product key was not found on your device. Error code: 0xC004F213

Nicolas Raoul

On the Ubuntu host, type the following command:

sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM

This will print out a few lines, the last line being the activation key contained in the laptop's firmware:

MSDMU
LENOVOTP-N11  
PTEC
#####-#####-#####-#####-#####

In a Windows guest:

  1. Click Search Loop.
  2. Enter activation.
  3. Click the item Activation settingsthat appears .
  4. Click Change product keythe button.
  5. Enter the activation key obtained from the Ubuntu command above.
  6. Click Activate.
  7. The following should be displayed:

enter image description here

enter image description here

At least it worked for me :-)

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