Thanks. Free Hex Editor says can process files up to 10 MB. My .vhd is around 1.5 GB, so I don't think that will work. I appreciate your help though.Quote:
Originally Posted by SuperSparks
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Thanks. Free Hex Editor says can process files up to 10 MB. My .vhd is around 1.5 GB, so I don't think that will work. I appreciate your help though.Quote:
Originally Posted by SuperSparks
I just looked at the footer of one of mine:The "Unique ID" field is underlined. It doesn't look like any HD serial number I've seen before, and I'm all out of ancient DOS utilities to test it with (this is a DOS VM), but I suppose it's possible that the presented serial number is derived from that somehow.Code:63 6F 6E 65 63 74 69 78-00 00 00 02 00 01 00 00 conectix........
00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00-0B 0C DA 98 76 70 63 20 ............vpc
00 05 00 03 57 69 32 6B-00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 ....Wi2k........
00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00-10 41 10 3F 00 00 00 03 .........A.?....
FF FF ED 72 9B DA 91 63-55 AF 11 DA 80 C6 EA CC ...r...cU.......
5E FC 6D 16 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ^.m.............
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
Be very careful if you're going to try changing it that you don't have any differencing or undo disks associated with the one you're changing -- the Unique ID is definitely used for tracking those associations.
(No suggestions on tools btw; I cut that off the VHD with "tail -1b original.vhd > footer.vhd" (requires one of Cygwin, SFU, tools for SUA etc) and opened it up with "debug footer.vhd". Going back the other way would be harder.)
Edit: I just found a suitable DOS tool -- the hardware serial number reported in Virtual PC is blank. If there's a way to change that then it'd probably be a new setting in the .vmc file, but I can't find any documentation on the format of that file.
I also found a tool for Windows that returns the hdd serial number. When I run it on my "pyhsical" computer, it returns something that does look like a serial number. On the VM, it returns blank. So I would be most definitely interested in how to populate that field in the VM.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuttle
I have no idea if this would work, and I would definitely advise that you make a copy of the .vhd file first. Here's how to mount a .vhd file in Windows:
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy...01/734435.aspx
Then you might be able to use a normal serial change utility on it. This is a good one:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys.../VolumeId.mspx
That's only the software volume ID unfortunately, not the manufacturer serial number.
Note that a "Volume Serial Number" (created when formating a partition) is completely separate from a hard drive's true embedded serial number. For example:
http://www.SpywareDrGuide.com/Virtua..._sn_vsn_01.jpg
Two Seagate 250MB SATA hard drives. HD0 has two partitions, C: and E: and HD1 has a single partition, D:. Both the LABEL command and Everest show the same "Volume Serial Number"'s for the three partitions:C: = A465-2B52Seagate's "SeaTools for Windows" shows the true Seagate serial numbers for each drive:
D: = 28DA-A93E
E: = 4292-E8FBHD0 = 3ND02LXCUnlike a volume "Label" and/or "Volume Serial Number" which can be altered fairly easily by an end user, an embedded hard drive serial number cannot be.
HD1 = 3ND00WSF
I fully understand the difference between volume serial number and manufacturer serial number, and, while on a physical computer the latter cannot be changed, I thought there should be a way to change the manufacturer serial number on a virtual machine, since it appears that information is not populated by Virtual PC anyways.
It turns out that the physical serial number will always report blank on Virtual PC and Virtual Server -- it can't be changed. I haven't found anything that suggests it can be done in VMware either, although I didn't sign up to have a copy of their .vmdk spec sent to me (you can't just go and download it).
To, reactivate this thread, on some HDD's, HDD serial Number is writed in a EEprom, whitch can be changed, if you know a litle electronics and have the rigth tools.
Well, I know a little about electronics - would you tell me more about the right tools? Thank you in advance.Quote:
Originally Posted by mmx64
you need to locate the eeprom, see it type, and get a eeprom programmer for it, read the data, locate the serial, modify it then write it back. Tools for serial eeprom programming you can find at www.lancos.com, or beeprogQuote:
Originally Posted by Dongle
Thank you, mmx64.
The Eeprom is an ATMEL0536 in a Toshiba MK1031GAS. The beeprog devices are wickedly expensive for this project, but I'll try it with the Lancos-PonyProg. If there any useful results, I'll post it here.
Dongle
Well i dont know this eeprom model, but for shure pony-prog cannot read-write it. Inst there another code on that eeprom?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dongle
Meanwhile I learnt that the serial numer lives in the system area on the platters, see here at video position 3:20 ff. That means one needs special software e.g. PC3000 to access that area.