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#1
Home Premium 64 bit physical machine to 32 bit VM
I've see a lot of threads that hit around my question but haven't yet found the one that answered it completely.
About 6 months ago I bought an HP laptop that came with 7HP 64 bit. I dual booted it with Linux and everything worked great until... Last week Windows crashed. Linux still worked fine and I was able to pull all of my documents off of the Windows partition and save them on the Linux partition. I tried everything I could to recover Windows. The HP discs that I purchased with the laptop, the Macrium disc I made, the HP recovery partition, anti-virus rescue discs, Hiren's BCD and a Windows 7 HP disc I borrowed from a friend. Nothing would repair it.
Now I'm at a crossroads. I primarily use Linux on this machine and would like to simply run 7 as a VM. When I try this it will only run as 32 bit and the activation code will not work. Since this is on the same physical machine that 7 originally came on is there any way to activate my copy of Windows on the VM? I'm hoping to not have to buy a $100 license when I just bought a new laptop that came with 7HP.