Windows 7 install - phone activation?

[Chrisroman]

I have a license of Win 7 Pro, that's always been used for a VM of my work environment. This license has never been installed on anything other than a VM.

Today, I did a reinstall, and the automatic activation didn't work. I needed to call in and do phone activation. It worked fine, but what caused this to happen? It's been almost a year since the last install, and the keys never been used for anything else.

Also the base computer hasn't changed... except for a new SSD. Would that small change cause this?

 

[Liger88]

Probably because the VM doesn't do an absolute mirror of your hardware. There are somethings built-in to the VM software itself that probably registers as different hardware when you used the key in the VM. I'm thinking things like audio/video, maybe even Ethernet ports, etc. The hardware is not seen the same by Windows because it technically isn't. The VM is emulating hardware for the most part using its own defaults to simulate a general piece it's emulating.

Maybe that's it. If it was something like ESXi then I don't know because that's a little more bare metal VM, but I'm sure it would have similar quirks.

 

[Faethon]

It's caused by multiple hardware changes. Happened to me with WinXP. Liger gives a plausible mechanism of how they were triggered.