hard drive serial number
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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Oct 1998
    Location
    Farmington Hills, MI USA
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    155

    hard drive serial number

    I have a commercial software package for small business that I have been selling for a long time. Its kind of like a POS but does a lot more.

    I have been using different ways of software security to avoid piracy including dongle hardware lock, third party software licensing etc. Most of these require a new compile of the product on my part for every new client.

    I have come up with a way to do it within the software without having to buy a third party product which only adds on my nightmares of post-sales support. I want your openion on this:

    When the product is launched, it checks for hard drive serial number and stores in the memory. It then checks for a particular place in the registry for an encrypted text. If it finds it, it decrypts it, parses out the multiple keys from the string and the remaining is hard drive serial number. Then it compares the hard drive serial number found in the decrypted text with the serial number of the hard drive it earlier retrieved. If the encrypted text in the registry was not found at all or the hard drive serial numbers didn't match, it tells the user that the software is not registered. It also displays the hard drive serial number to the user telling him to call or email my company to let me know the number.

    Most of the time I am the one putting together the hardware and software for my customer so the user won't see this dialog in most cases. But I wanna be able to allow downloading the product over the web etc so I do want to be able to register the product remotely.

    I have created a tool to generate a registry file. The tool uses the serial number and a combination of keys to create a encrypted string to be stored in a registry location. The registry file would then be sent to the buying/paying customer.

    I didn't mean to bore you guys with the whole story here but what I want to know is that is is possible to change the serial number of a hard drive?

    If you use ghost software or something similar to create ghost images and then deploy them back to a new hard drive, does the serail number of the source hard drive get copied too?

    Also, let me know of what you think about it and if you have a better idea or point out and disadvantages that I am not seeing?

    I know that this idea will not work with SCSI hard drives but I am not concerend about that.

    I really appreciate your time...
    Last edited by masif; November 18th, 2002 at 12:40 PM.

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