Re-Activation required in Guest OS

[Techhead156]

To my understanding a VM (once activated), stays activated. I also thought this was true even on different Macs,

I recently had a 2.2 Gig Mac Go "bust" but I had Windows XP activated and backed up on DVD.

Since then I got a new mac, and thought i'd install Parallels on it. All was fine till after installing Parallels Tools, upon the next boot, winxp ask me to re-activate... as the attachment shows.

While I understand this would be caused by the MAC address of the VM being different, why is this so? Don't Parallels, like all VM based apps, use virtual hardware, which is why I could install it fine on the same mb as many times as i like without worrying about re-action, but nt on a different mac?

 

[John@Parallels]

Is it Boot Camp VM, or you backed up pvm file, also please note, some hardware is not virtual in VM

 

[Techhead156]

Re-activation

No. non-BC

It was only a backup of the hard disk image from Parallels 3.0 (build 5582), no config file.

 

[John@Parallels]

if you have ability to create VM with config file in version 3, Parallels Desktop v 4 , will keep all data in tact, but thus, assigning new Mac address leads to reactivation

 

[Techhead156]

Re-activation

Just out of curiosity, I took a snapshot of this (attached file)

If I choose to use current MAC address (presumably this is the virtual Mac address in PD), would be sufficient enough to not have to re-active ?