Installing Windows from Ubuntu

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, 30 Apr 2023 at 10:58, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2023-04-30 at 10:33 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> > Win10 is more usable than just about anything earlier unactivated.
> > Install it on bare metal & on almost any UEFI PC it will self
> > activate using a key in the firmware.
>
> Even better, you can generally extract the product key from the
> firmware and use it to activate a virtual. Provided you don't use the
> key in more than one place, I would even say that this is a proper use
> of a key you have actually paid for, but IANAL and who knows what
> restrictions Microsoft might have applied.
>
> The method I used a couple of years ago and stuck in my Big List Of
> Handy Hints was this:
>
>    sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
>
> I just checked and it still seems to work on my two-year old Lenovo
> laptop, so I guess it's Windows 10. I get this:
>
>    kauer at kt1:~$ sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
>    [sudo] password for kauer:
>    MSDMU
>    LENOVOCB-01
>    ACPI
>    XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX
>
> The Xes are the key (obfuscated here). You are looking for five
> consecutive sets of five characters separated by hyphens. Each set
> contains only decimal digits and upper case letters.

Oh my! I did not know that would work! Impressive hack!

-- 
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