Karthick's Blog!

If ever you have tried using VMWare Workstation to install Windows OS, as soon as you select the .iso image, it will prompt you for the product key and you would have entered the same. But once the installation starts, it will give you this message. The unattend answer file contains an invalid product key. Either remove the invalid key or provide a valid product key in the unattend answer file to proceed with windows installation All you need to do is, Power Off the VM. Open the autoinst.flp file, find where the product key is and re-type it... guess this is a bug with VMWare which adds some special characters to the product key when given initially. Once you have saved back the file, you can re-start the installation and it will go through successfully. Screenshots below:

When you try to install the new breed of Microsoft OS' on a VMWare Workstation, especially using a iso image, VMWare gives us the option of going with "Easy Install" and prompts us for the product key right in the beginning, after the installation starts, it gives us a invalid key message! Quite annoying, don't worry, all you need to do is open the autoinst.flp file in notepad and re-enter the key... Now start the VM and the installation will go through fine!

If you are looking at running 64 bit guest machines inside a Virtual PC, you will only end up disappointed as both VPC 2007 and Windows Virtual PC (that comes with Windows 7) do not support running 64 bit guest machines.... very disappointing indeed. The only way if you need to do this, is to use VMWare Workstation : not free though :( . Ofcourse, do not forget the fact that your processor needs to be VT enabled and Hardware Virtualization option needs to be enabled in BIOS