VMWare "Boot Camp" Partition or Windows Activation and You: A Tragedy

[SavvyX4]

I've been running my Hackintosh as a Mac only machine with Windows 7 available in a VM for quite a while now, but some things have come up where the native video performance I would see booted into Win7 would be nice, so I thought why not do a native install onto another hard drive, and then use that drive for my VM for normal usage.

 

I know that this can be done on Apple hardware that is using Boot Camp to facilitate a native Windows install, as I'm doing this on my MacBook with great success.

 

Step 1: Add HD and install Win7. No problems here, and Chameleon shows the Windows partitions and I can choose them (well, system reserved) to boot from with no issues. Verify that things are working great, do not activate and reboot to Mac OS X.

 

Step 2: Fire up VMWare Fusion and configure my "Boot Camp" VM. This also works with no problems. It comes up and prompts me to install the tools, as it normally would for a Boot Camp partition, and I'm thinking that all is well.

 

I look up how VMWare recommends handling activation between the two environments before proceeding.

 

Step 3: Boot back into native Win7 and activate. No problem.

 

Step 4: Reboot into Mac OS X, load my "Boot Camp" VM and double check that the VMWare tools are loaded, which they are. Windows is reporting that Activation is required again (which VMWare's document stated would be the case.). Go through activation. Now things get funky.

 

At this point I get an error message, and am given the option of canceling activation or changing my product key. Some quick googling indicates that this occasionally happens on normal PCs as well, and that by simply reentering your key, the system should activate without a problem. I follow this advice and it does activate normally.

 

Step 5: VMWare's docs state that both environments should be activated at thsi time, and I should be good to go. So, I reboot into Win7 and unfortunately it shows that it again requires activation, even though I believe it shouldn't.

 

At this point I have not reactivated, because I'm concerned about all the activations showing up for my new key, and don't want to get blacklisted after just getting the key. Has anyone had any experience with this setup and actually gotten activation to work between both environments?

 

I'd be thrilled to get this working, but at the moment I'm not thinking that I have many options to pursue....