Hard drive serial number - can windows change it?

[Special K]

If you go to a command prompt and type label, it will give you your hard drive's serial number. Now I was under the impression that this was hard-coded into the hard drive itself, but maybe I am wrong. I have a program that uses a licensing scheme similar to MS' wpa. Basically you give the company your hard drives serial number via their website (and apparently it grabs your NICs MAC address all on its own) and then they send you a .dat file to use as the license. Now I saved my .dat file from the first time a requested a license (last april), did a clean install of winXP last June, and have just now gotten around to reinstalling the software. The problem was that it wouldnt take my old license file. It said error with the hard drives serial number not matching. I typed label and sure enough it was different than the first time, even though it was the exact same physical drive as before. It wasn't really a problem; I just requested a new license file at got it. But why/how did the serial number of my HD change?

 

[sohcrates]

Hard drive serial number is a random number that is generated by DOS or Windows every time you format your hard drive. It is not a model number or serial number of your physical hard drive

(i just read this from google...if true, it would explain what's going on)

though i never realized that was the case either...

 

[GigaCluster]

The company cannot grab your MAC address unless they got you to run their software that sent it to them. A MAC address is not revealed via the Internet.
I have no respect for companies that tie the product to a replaceable/changeable token.

 

[NogginBoink]

The "volume serial number" is *not* the manufacturer's serial number of the hard drive.

The "volume serial number" is on the volume (i.e. partition). I think.... yeah... on an NTFS partition, in the partition bootsector, appears to be at offset 0x48. On a DOS partition, sez here it's at offset 0x27.

In any case, the "volume serial number" appears to be something that OS/2 used. Windows doesn't use it to the best of my knowledge.

 

[NogginBoink]

And the volume serial number is NOT the hard drive's serial number which is also NOT the hard drive's signature (which the Windows OSes *do* use).

You need to determine which of these the software is interested in. Subtle changes in wording make a big difference.

 

[bacillus]

great info guys!

 

[Special K]

I figured that the volume serial number was not hard-coded into the drive itself, although the instructions for the license refer to the number as the hard disk serial number, which makes it seem like they are referring to something else.

 

[Swampster]

With all due respect to the previous poster, YES, they can easily get your MAC address. Cable (unlike DSL) uses this to identify you as a legitimate user and so do many other networking systems that use dynamic IP addressing.