Please forgive my ignorance in advance. I'm a relatively inexperienced person. I provide phone support for my local Cable/ISP. I help people configure their email and set up bookmarks in their web browser. I also use Linux recreation-ally. I'm well below the technical level of everyone on this forum.
I have a question about VMware Workstation 10. I'm using the Windows version to run Windows XP on my Windows 7 machine. I mean that Windows 7 is the Client and Windows XP is the Guest. I made a Virtual Machine disk and I installed Windows XP on it. I installed a bunch of old legacy software I wanted to use on the virtual disk, including a few programs that use registration keys that track the Windows machine SID (Security IDentifier)
Then, I cloned the virtual disk file and I booted into Linux. I opened VM Ware Workstation 10 for Linux and opened the cloned disk. Some of my software doesn't run because the Machine SID changed between the virtual disk clones.
Then, I tried opening the original virtual Machine disk and IT has a different Machine SID depending on whether I'm running it in Windows or Linux as the Client. It's not two different Machine SIDs...it changes to a fresh, unique Machine SID each time I reboot and change operating systems. I can't afford to keep re-buying keys for my old software.
Is there a way to make the two virtual disk files use the same SID all the time, or at least make one disk file use the same SID no matter what Client system it's using?
I tried Googling for help but all the discussion about SIDs was ways to change them to be unique. Apparently, I'm the only one who can't get my virtual SIDs to stay locked down.