Boot Camp Vista activation

[EMR]

I've just reinstalled my 32-bit Vista on Boot Camp, but haven't activated it yet, just in case its use in a Fusion virtual machine should spoil things. Can anyone explain how I should proceed? Should I activate before trying to run my Boot Camp partition inside Fusion? Should I run the Boot Camp partition inside Fusion and then activate (from Fusion)? Or am I just supposed to run Boot Camp inside Fusion, install VMware tools and then go back to stand-alone Boot Camp and activate from there?

Thanks.

[admin]

You might want to hold off on flipping back and forth with Vista. From the release notes:

For this Beta release, VMware Fusion supports Boot Camp partitions running Windows XP, and provides experimental support for Boot Camp partitions running Windows Vista. Note that with Boot Camp partitions running Windows Vista, you must reactivate Windows each time you switch between your Boot Camp partition and virtual machine.[/b]

In general, the procedure is:

Activate BootCamp (can be done before or after the other steps)

Boot in Fusion, install Tools

Activate in Fusion

[EMR]

Then I'd better not activate until VMware find a procedure that only requires activaing once or twice at most. I'm afraid my license might become void if I activate it every single time I swap booting native or virtual.

Let's hope a new beta or RC of Fusion solving the issue appears before one month, or else I'll have to instal Vista again from scratch!

Thanks.

[Pat_Lee]

I highly recommend using WinClone (a free third party tool for the Mac) to backup your Boot Camp VM in it's current installed and working state, so it will be easier to roll back to it so you don't have to reinstall from scratch ever.

Pat

[EMR]

Thanks, Pat, I'll look into that. What I meant to say was that, seeing that I might have serious problems if I activate Vista now (seeing I want to run it both natively and in a Fusion virtual machine), it will run into demo mode in less than 30 days. Even if I make a clone of my Vista installation as it is today, will it still work if I restore it in one month's time? My hunch was it wouldn't, unless, of course, I activated then. The point is, I don't want to activate until I can use it reliably (without the need of perpetual activations) in both native Boot Camp AND Fusion.

Congratulations on an otherwise excellent product. I only wish I could be testing Unity on Vista!

[Andreas_Masur]

Well...you should be able to make a disk image once you have it actived...but granted that is actually what you try to avoid...

As far as I know the activation cannot be tricked that easy by just installing a snapshot over and over...I would have into the source code though to actually be sure...but I guess others would have found out that already if it would be that easy...

Ciao, Andreas