RE: VMWare & WinXP

["Mark Brunner" <kohi10 () rogers com>]

Hmmm, I haven't tried this in a VM situation, however, I reformat my hard
drive every 30 - 90 days (very paranoid) and use a little trick to avoid
having to constantly re-register.  It might work for you.

Boot your system into Safe Mode.
Copy the C:\Windows\System32\wpa.dbl file to another directory.
Boot into Normal Mode.
Copy the wpa.dbl into the same directory in your Virtual system.

Should now be activated.  Let me know if that works for you.  I'm hoping to
setup VMWare on one of my XP systems shortly, so it would be nice to know if
that works beforehand.

Cheers!
Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason T. Hallahan [mailto:jthallah () gmail com]
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2005 2:36 PM
To: security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: VMWare & WinXP


Hello and good day,

I recently purchased a laptop from Dell with Win XP Professional on it
for the purpose of setting up a VMWare virtual network for
honeypot/pen-testing purposes. However, when I go to install my new
copy of XP (which is the host OS of my box) in a virtual machine, it
won't activate. I tried calling Microsoft and going through the
automated process on the phone, but it says my installation is
invalid. Is there any way around this (I am not trying to cheat
Microsoft here) or any way to speak to a Microsoft representation to
explain my situation? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you and best regards!

- Jason