How do I upgrade an OEM WIM to allow boot to vhd?

[Guest Arlo Belshee]

I have a Lenovo machine with OEM goodness that I want to keep. However, I want to switch over to running everything boot from VHD (no native / bare metal OS installed on the machine at all).

I can mostly get this to work, except that the OEM install is W7 Pro, not Ultimate. Thus I get the license error. Assuming that I've got a legal copy of Ultimate lying around (or an upgrade key), how do I upgrade my VHD to Ultimate so that it'll boot?

When I try to boot that VHD, I get the license error before getting into the OS. So I can't use the anytime upgrade functionality. I don't see anywhere in the setup process where I could appy an upgrade (even from a sysprepped version of the VHD).

I'm using the wim2vhd script to make my VHD from the Lenovo recovery WIM (well, split WIM) files. So it would all work if I could apply the upgrade to that WIM (or use one of the script's abilitie sto modify the WIM. For example, it allows applying QFEs to the WIM during the VHD build process).

Any ideas?

My fallback is to buy some disk imaging software, re-install to a bare box, upgrade that, snap an image and make a VHD from it. I'd rather not go this route, as it requires buying software that I'll only use this once and leaves me with an image that is not sysprep-clean.

 

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