Hypervisor detected. Unable to uninstall Hyper-V on Windows 11 (Windows Surface Pro+)

Question

I have purchased a new Microsoft Windows Surface Pro 5+. Windows was pre-installed.

I noticed that a 3rd party tool output a warning that my license it not valid for terminals. The developers told me that it was because Hypervisor is detected. And that I needed to un-install Hypervisor.

Their license log says the following:

Embedded : no 
Terminal : no 
Citrix : no 
VMWare : no 
VirtualPC : no 
VirtualBox : no 
Hypervisor : yes

They use the CPUID function to detect Hypervisor: https://evasions.checkpoint.com/techniques/cpu.html

I opened msinfo32.exe, and it really said "Hypervisor detected:"

msinfo32.exe

I have tried everything I could do to un-install / disable Hyper-V, but none of the methods proposed on Microsoft Answers worked.

As one can see, I have deactived all virtualization services in Windows Features, but it does not change anything. It still reports that Hyper-V is detected:

Windows Features

Using Powershell:

Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V-Hypervisor" 

did not work. The error is:

Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature : The feature name Microsoft-Hyper-V-Hypervisor is unknown.
+ Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature], COMException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.Dism.Commands.DisableWindowsOptionalFeatureCommand

The following also does not work:

Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V-Hypervisor/Get-Features

This also does not work:

DISM /Online /Disable-Feature:Microsoft-Hyper-V

The error is: (...) is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet (...)

The following cmd statement reports "Successfully executed", but does not disable Hyper-V:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off

Answer 1

@harrymc: Sometimes there are reasons to get rid of the Hyper-V Modules. This has nothing to do with destroying Windows. You even can't run other Hypervisor like Virtualbox on those systems

Anyway - I got exact the same issue on my Laptop (preinstalled Win11 Home) For me this was the solution: Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Device Security > Core Isolation > Memory Integrity = OFF

Reboot and it should work now

Answer 2

I can't help but laugh at how long this took to figure out. This is what worked for me, in the order I tried. The last step I figured out on my own:

1. Uninstall other hypervisors like VirtualBox

2. Remove the following Windows features:

   • Hyper-V
   • Virtual Machine Platform
   • Windows Hypervisor Platform
   • (maybe) Windows Sandbox
   • (maybe) Windows Subsystem For Linux

3. Disable Windows Security> Device Security> Core Isolation: Memory Integrity

4. (Possibly unrelated to your scenario) Uninstalled Bluestacks 5 with this tool

5. (What finally worked) Disable Microsoft Defender Device & Credential Guard and all other virtualization-based security features: There are a number of sketchy tutorials but I used this script

   ...with these parameters: DG_Readiness_Tool_v3.6.ps1 -Disable -AutoReboot

Note, you are disabling security features and all that implies.