Whenever a hard drive is formatted in Windows a serial number is assigned in the end. This serial number is often used by software applications to restrict a software installation to that hard drive or reduce the number of allowed activations by one by linking the serial number of the hard drive to one of the allowed activations.
This should not be confused with the hardware serial number that gets added in the manufacturing process. The Hard Disk Serial Number Changer (link) can change the serial number that gets assigned when a hard drive is formatted in Windows. This can be really useful if an existing hard drive has to be formatted without loosing an activation or software association. It can also come in handy if a new hard drive is added to a computer system to replace an older one especially if software needs to be transferred or reinstalled on that new hard drive.
The software program is portable and can therefor be executed directly after finishing the download. The program will provide access to all drive letters of connected hard drives and floppy drives and their assigned serial numbers.
A click in the Serial Number text field allows to edit the existing serial which has to be in the form XXXX-XXXX with only hex symbols allowed.
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Cool! This would come in handy.
But who is “ghacksnews”? And why are they posting tinyurl’s?
Good find Martin. I haven’t thought of a way I’ll use it yet but often the apps that save the day are the ones you added to the collection just cause you thought they were cool and you could.
As always, awesome work. Keep it up.
Hello,
This is actually not a harddisk “serial number” changer, it only changes the VOLUME serial number.
I think that is made clear in the post. And the developer calls it hard disk serial number changer which is why the term is used in the article. But good point.
I’ve been a Certified PC tech for years and never new this existed.. This is really going help out everyone…
Excellent timing! I just got the replacement HD for my laptop today. Thanks for this!
Good find. I’ve been using the sysinternals tool to do this (VolumeID.exe) but that tool is command line only. I prefer GUI.
It is volume serial numer, not disk freak
Volume serial only. Useless if application is using the physical hdd serial number like the hddphysic component from rlbyte dot com does.