Allow SMBIOS information to be copied from host

[Roland Kaufmann]

Please see this thread: <​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=3224>, in particular the original message from user disz and the one at Mon Feb 25, 2008 11:53 pm.

In short the request is to add functionality to copy the SMBIOS information from the host to be reflected in the guest machine.

Use case: One prefers for instance Linux as the main operating system. The machine was however originally delivered with Windows, including some software that is desirable to run. Dual-booting is considered cumbersome. This problem could be solved by running the software in a virtualized, seamless Windows guest, but this requires that the OEM version has access to the correct SMBIOS information in order to not fail activation.

[Frank Mehnert]

Please refer to the user manual 9.13.

[Roland Kaufmann]

Oops, guess I didn't read the manual carefully enough. Please add "(a.k.a. SMBIOS)" to the end of the first paragraph in that section, since many use that phrase to search for.

From the <​http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sms/20/getasset.mspx> it seems that the necessary information (table 0 and 1) should be available on Windows with the commands:

wmic path Win32_BIOS

wmic path Win32_ComputerSystemProduct

You may want to add that information to the documentation, too.

[yortx]

In some DELL machines it is not enough to set only the parameters specified in the "user manual".

The command

wmic path Win32_ComputerSystemProduct

shows different strings compared to the virtual machine in the field "Version" (fixed to 1.2 in the VM)

It would be also interesting to add an option to "bypass" the original SMBIOS information.

The command

wmic path Win32_BIOS

shows also different strings in many fields but probably are not relevant.

[Technologov]

VBox 3.2.0

My understanding, is that some info gets copied for Mac OS X guests to be able to run. Anyone wanna put some clarifications?

-Technologov