Digital activation coming from nowhere ?!?

MaloK said:

@cereberus, I did, but for some reason it wont boot in UEFI in VBox, (booting in MBR Windows reported an hardware change).

But it boots fine on real UEFI HW And I want that part running for testing. Without installing other VM engines in my poor little W7...

I think this is a problem with VHD and UEFI in VBox because everything I tried ended in a non booting image and I know Windows 10 install correctly in UEFI under VBox but there is still something with VHD/x that would not work in my setup.

I wil test a wtg drive on hyper-V. I think solution would be to install windows on a second vhd in vm, then attach wth drive, and add boot entry to second vm. You could even delete windows on second vm.

Trick is not to use efi on wtg I think.

I will test it.

MaloK said:

Yes I was able to create a Dual MBR / UEFI startup sequence so it can boot in UEFI / CSM / MBR mode, but It fails finding Winload.efi in VBox. The boot Drive uses NTFS_UEFI boot sector and is formatted in NTFS.

I am a bit confused - are you saying your WTG drive is an MBR drive. I always create them as a UEFI install by converting drive to GPT first then using rufus to create wtg drive.

Also is windows in a vhd on wtg boot drive ? If so, trying to boot vhd in a vm would not work without boot files, but you should be able to add a windows dual boot entry to an existing windows vm installation.

MaloK said:

Yes, the USB and the VHD are MBR disks, There is no problem booting on MBR disk in UEFI...

Create a VHD, attach it, Fire Rufus, Browse for your Windows Installation ISO, Select Wintogo from Drop list. Select MBR/UEFI boot support, Select your VHD as target, Write the disk directly. Detach disk and load it in VM. That part is pretty straight forward.

Booting from a USB drive: Create a Rufus MBR/UEFI boot disk from any Windows PE based iso you have. Delete the whole content and copy your VHD file to it, you need to create 2 BCD, one for MBR and one for UEFI, in standard architecture and add a copy of the bootmgr file from inside your VHD to the root of the drive.

That's all.



To answer more precisely the second part of your post: Yes the VHD contains all boot files required.

I may not be being clear but when you attach vhd to a virtual machine, it generally will not boot. You could boot from a Macrium Reflect iso to fix it but then wtg drive will not boot on native host.

However, if you have an existing windows 10 installation in a vhd, you can create a boot entry for windows in wtg drive (the vm just sees it as a second drive). That way the vhd boot files are not affected. I have done similar before, as you could not upgrade wtg vhds except in a vm.


I am testing it now. Mind you, I am only using uefi.

MaloK said:

That worked perfectly... I don't know what to say, to not to look like a 2 year old... "WHY !!!" But I understand What you meant with booting VM versus Real HW...

Hardly 2 yr old LOL. It is quite confusing working out which boot files you need to use in a vm to get a vhd created outside of vm to boot.

I often install an OS in Hyper-V to ensure vhd has the EFI partition, and then boot vhd in host using boot entry in host bcd. Thus when you native boot, you are using host bcd not the bcd in vhd.

I just extended that logic to your case. The trick is to leave the wtg bcd alone, and attach a dual boot entry of the wtg windows drive to an existing bcd.

You could even create a dual boot entry of the wtf vhd on the host pc bcd - although the wtg drive is a usb drive, windows sees the wtg vhd as a fixed drive, and will happily boot the vhd even though not on internal hard drive.

MaloK said:

@cereberus, Yeah, at some point I try not to chain 3 boot loaders to get something done...

But thanks a lot you helped me reach my goal... Now that I'm able to boot the VHD in a VM in UEFI mode on the machine, WinToGo is Activated in VM upon boot. That was not the case with MBR.

But still if Windows boot un-activated, all my configurations remains... So this is a very viable WinToGo for me.

I started installing my Programs and it works pretty good. all of the machine used with it are all "Pro" Licensed and it should run activated nearly all the time...

Now, I forgot about the Intel Optane drivers and crashed hard with the sister Laptop... Loll. Have to integrate these.

I have a batch file injects optane drivers into boot.wim and install.wim in installation iso. When I created the wtg drive tonight, i forgot to do that, and could not see host pc drives LOL.

I call Optane "Optuse"!