I have a Windows 10 VM in VirtualBox (Ubuntu 14 host, VirtualBox 5.0.10 platform). It was originally a Windows 7 virtual machine, and Windows 7 was fully activated.
A few days ago, I wanted to run some Windows Updates and install Threshold 2, but I was told that there wasn't enough disk space.
No problem, just resize the disk.... except, that's a problem. I have 2 snapshots (that I don't really care about) of the Windows 10, and my snapshots are preventing the virtual machine from seeing the increased disk size.
When I go to delete the snapshots, I get either of the following messages, depending on which snapshot it is that I'm trying to delete:
- Hard disk {path-to-disk file} has more than one child hard disk (2). or...
- Unable to merge storage {path-to-disk file} not enough free storage space.
(I increased the disk size from 45GB up to 60GB using vboxmanage)
So then I read that if I clone the VM, that would essentially get rid of the snapshots for me, and then I could increase the disk size on the cloned VM.
That's what I did as of a few days ago. I then successfully installed Threshold 2.
This evening, as I sat down to do some work, I noticed that Windows was telling me that it wasn't activated. I went into the Settings, and the message was that "Windows 10 isn't activated because the previous version of Windows was never activated."
Fortunately, I had a backed up copy of the old VM (pre-clone, and pre-updating to Threshold 2). I turned that back on, and confirmed that Windows was indeed activated.
Why the heck did Windows 10 lose its activation on the clone that I created? Can I create a clone without Windows losing its activation? If not, how can I delete these snapshots, which are preventing me from resizing the hard disk that Windows uses?