Hi,
during migration of a Windows (11 Pro) VM from libvirt to Incus, I ran into a stuck-on-boot problem which I could solve with the help of this thread by changing the IO bus to NVME, which made the VM boot successfully.
Unfortunately, Windows was not activated anymore afterwards. Any idea what could be causing this?
Thanks…
Dirk
I don’t know that it’s particularly clear what Windows keys off for the activation.
The hardware platform exposed by Incus is quite different from the default one coming out of QEMU, so it can easily look to Windows as if you replaced basically all your hardware and just happen to be using the same disk image as that’s actually pretty consistent with what just happened.
I’ve usually not had any issue getting the system re-activated in such cases as all they really want to make sure is that you’re not using the same license on two systems, so going through the activation process (online or phone) usually lets you fix those kind of issues pretty quickly.
Yeah, thought so already, but hoped there was some easy way to solve this by applying some “raw.qemu” settings. Thanks a lot for clarifying, will try to reactivate…
The problem is that it’s not clearly stated why a machine needs to be reactivated.
If it would tell you that it’s because hardware component so and so is missing, then raw.qemu or similar tricks would work.
One thing that may be worth trying is lining up the UUID from libvirt with our volatile.uuid.
That’s the unique machine ID exposed through the firmware, so that may be something Windows is checking.