[Mashiro]

@tryp4vps

It is actually very likely that your Windows 10 installation might need a re-activation after porting it from physical installation to a virtual machine. I ported a Hyper-V Windows 10 VM to physical hardware and instantly had to re-activate the license after it booted up. The reason for that is the big change in physical VS VM and vice versa in terms of hardware and etc. I also think that Microsoft has built in ways to detect that it is being run virtualized in terms of the re-licensing on hardware changes.

So much on the licensing subject.


You can revert VM to physical by using tools like Clonezilla or Acronis. Create a backup with them and restore it on the physical hardware. Reverting from the VHD to physical is a bit more work.

It would bascially work as follows:
1. Mount the Acronis Bootable ISO into your VM and set boot order to boot from the ISO.
2. In Acronis create a full backup of all partitions of your Windows 10 OS.
(If you can actually mount a USB storage device inside the VM to storage the backup file. If you cannot than you migh need to create a new empty VHD big enough to hold the backup file and later on mount that VHD to extract the backup file from it.)
4. Save the backup to a destination of your choice.
5. Boot the physical machine from the Acronis Bootable ISO and also insert the storage media with the backup file.
6. Restore the backup to the HDD of the physical machine.
(You might need to clean the partitions on the HDD first and create a simple NTFS partition beforehand.)

Sounds like a lot of work? It really isn't. The longest part is really the backup creation and restore process depending heavily on how big your OS partitions are. The rest is done quick and rather easy with Acronis.

There may be many other ways and different software. I use Acronis for Windows systems as it worked best so far for me. For Linux I wouldn't recommend Acronis. It cannot really deal well with EXT4 and such filesystems and would create a 1:1 sector backup file which takes very long because it would even backup empty space and you need a storage device with enough space to hold the backup.