I ran a Win 10 VM on my Linux server for more than a year (activated from a BIOS modded VirtualBox through Windows 7 upgrade). The mainboard of the computer (homeserver) broke. Windows 7 was easy to transfer and booted activated as I just had to set the SLIC Bios in VB. For Windows 10 it does not work that way. OS is Ubuntu 16.04 and Virtualbox is 5.0.32. I tried to create a empty Win10 Vm and then move my old files there but was not activated. Even so I put the SLIC BIOS in the correct place. Any ideas would be welcome - I need Windows 10 only to run some special programms that does not work on Linux.
Virtual machines are defined by the ID strings from BIOS/UEFI and any drives. When starting an already existing VM in VMware i get asked whether i 'Moved it' or 'Copied it'. The first would conserve all IDs, so it's the same machine and activation should prevail. The latter would result in new IDs and a completely different virtual hardware with no activation. Doesn't have VBox a similiar feature .
Became obviously rusty. Can remember VMware related stuff, but since i don't use VBox, there's not much to remember i fear.
Replace the 'Machine uuid' to the created VM *.vbox file as well as in the VirtualBox.xml file (VirtualBox.xml is typically locatedin 'C:\Users\%USERNAME%\.VirtualBox') with the old one.
I use Ubuntu 16.04. On my desktop machine I found the VirtualBox.xml in ~/.config/VirtualBox but on my server I don't have such folder and file. On my desktop the recommended procedure worked, on the server it didn't. Just thought the wrong way. On the server VirtualBox is executed under user vbox. Here the files reside in /home/vbox/.config/VirtualBox I don't know why I did not thought about that. I guess it shouldn't be a problem now to transfer the VM from the old server.