Jan 07, 2018 Recently, I was asked if changing the serial number on a hard drive would create issues with installed software, licenses or computer tracking. I honestly don't know. The hard drive is the boot drive and is running Windows 10 Pro. Can anybody tell me what problems might arise by changing the hard drive serial number?
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Some multiplayer games that implement the PunkBuster anti cheat system get cheaters off the server using hardware bans. It used to ban the hard disk serial number but no longer does that since there are ways to spoof and temporarily change the so-called hardcoded serial number. So now theyâve started to ban the CD-Key. Other than that, some licensing system also uses the hard disk serial number to generate a unique hardware ID which is then used to generate an external license file to activate the software.
If you do a simple search in Google, youâll find tons of information about to change your hard disk volume serial number, but not the real hard disk serial number that is hard coded into the hardware. Some people said that it is impossible to change it, but we will show you that there are ways to change both volume and hard coded serial numbers for your hard disk.
A simple way to find your current hard disk volume serial number is to open a command prompt (Win key+R and type cmd) and then type dir. The second line shows your volume serial number for the system C partition. Type dir [driveletter:] and it will show a different serial number even if the volume is on the same physical hard drive. The volume serial number changes every time you format the partition and Windows also uses this value during activation so you canât simply move your install from one partition to another. If your Windows has been activated using a product key from a sticker it will probably ask for the key again after a reboot and will need reactivating if you change the volume serial number on the system drive.
1. Hard Disk Serial Number Changer
There are a few free tools around capable of changing the volume serial number and one of them is called Hard Disk Serial Number Changer. The name is a bit misleading though as it doesnât actually change the hard disk serial number but the volume serial number which is different. It works on just about any Windows operating system from 98 onward and is a standalone portable executable but does need to be run as administrator on Vista and 7.
Usage is pretty straightforward and you simply choose your drive from the drop down box, enter the new serial number and click the Change button. Do note the serial number format as mentioned in the window is made up of 8 hex characters from 0-9 and A-F split by a â-â into two groups of 4. You will then need to reboot to commit the changes.
Download Hard Disk Serial Number Changer
2. VolumeID
Another useful tool to change the volume serial number is by Sysinternals called VolumeID. This tool is only usable from the command line so wonât be as quick and easy to use for some people as Hard Disk Serial Number Changer. The command line usage to change the ID of a drive volume/partition is:
volumeid [driveletter:] xxxx-xxxx
The format is again 4 hex characters, a â-â followed by another 4 hex characters. You should shut down all your running applications before using this tool and will need to reboot immediately after the changes if they are being made on an NTFS partition.
Download Sysinternals VolumeID
The tools above are fine for changing the serial number of a volume/partition but trying to change the serial number of the actual hard drive itself is a whole different story. These are hard coded into the hard drive itself and cannot simply be edited or altered using a piece of software. There are however, several tools around that can spoof the hard driveâs built in serial number temporarily which can hopefully fool whatever software you are trying to get round. Unfortunately a lot of these tools arenât free and some are even approaching $100 to buy.
3. PB DownForce
There is a free tool thatâs been around for quite a while called PB DownForce which is able to temporarily spoof your hard driveâs static serial number into a different random or seeded number. There is also an option to set your own predefined serial number although we were unable to get that function to work during testing. To use the program in itâs simplest form, all you have to do is start it up and click on the Start spoofing button. Make sure to run PB DownForce as administrator.
The Advanced options button shows the 3 different types of spoofing to choose, although as mentioned we couldnât get method 3 to work as intended and it just showed a serial full of a single number. You can easily use the Stop Spoofing button and try another random number. Perform test will quickly tell what drive model name and serial has been given. The image below shows a new serial after using PB DownForce to change a hard disk serial number in the PC Wizard hardware information tool. Do note that some tools such as Speccy will still show the original serial number for the drive because they gather their data in another way, HWInfo does something different again and will show the spoofed drive as another completely new hard drive in its list.
PB DownForce was tested and worked on Windows XP and Windows 7 32-bit although it still was quite random to which machines worked and which showed no change or produced an error. 64-bit Windows is not supported in any free hard drive spoofing tools we came across. The spoofed serial will return to normal after a reboot.
Download PB DownForce
There are several more hard disk serial number Spoofing tools on page 2.
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whats the password for it BRUHHH
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HAL9000 Author2 weeks ago
Downloads with a password have it listed on the download page.
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hello raymond ! Reply
the Chameleon site not workinâ :(
iNfeRnO2 years ago
Chameleon appears to be dead. I guess none of these tools that are currently available work for newer operating systems, sadly.
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i got bluescreen . everytime i shutdown pc. when using pbdownforce
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chuje-muje-dzikie-wÄże12 months ago
because is wirus XD
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About PB DownForce. Reply
It is mentioned that It will spoof your hard driveâs serial number but temporarly. So youâll need to spoof your hard driveâs serial every time you open the game and connect to that certain server youâre banned in order not to get tracked?
Chowdhury Adnan Rahman5 years ago
Hello,
PB Down Force just made my dayâ¦..Thanks a lotâ¦.You are awesome.
Reply
Iâm trying to use PBdownforce on win 7 64 but Iâm getting error: âcommuniction failedâ. Any help on this ? Any other tool to spoof hdd serial on win 7 64 ?
Reply
HAL9000 Author5 years ago
As stated in the article PBDownforce doesnât work on 64-bit Windows, we couldnât find any free tools that do.
Reply
PBdownforce asking for password to run.
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HAL9000 Author4 years ago
Itâs written clearly on the download page.
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Another utility which allows changing of a volume serial number is âMiniTool Partition Wizardâ, whatâs more it changes the whole 32 bit long serial number, not only the last 16 visible bits (8 characters).
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Tom5 years ago
Sorry, my mistake â MiniTool reports Volume ID as a 8 byte (16 characters/64 bit) value, while other programs report only 4 bytes (8 characters/32 bits). Donât know what is the leading 32 bits, but the last 32 bits is the same as reported by VOL utility.
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hello! PB downforce is very useful for me but can you please tell me how to use my own serials and macs? I mean⦠what is the standard format? because I fill the fields with original and new serial and it doesnt work. Thank you very much!
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Mikan8 years ago
Thank you very much for the info, I need to change my hardware idâ¦.
Reply
Hey
I was struggling to change the volume id but by the help of
Hard Disk Serial Number Changer i was able to change it easily
Thank you ^_^
Reply
eabbas10 years ago
Hello. Reply
Thank you for this tip that is very good. bravo. I enjoyed of this program.
COOL!!!
Reply
Joe11 years ago
Well, I have been searching for that for a long time. So detailed and you provided a good research you did yourself.. lol
I am downloading the PB gui program, hopefully it will work. Thanks
Reply
Master , Genius Reply
thanks to you I think I could find a way to temporary fix the problem with the local ban in Counter Strike using Pbdownforce.. thanks!
123vso11 years ago
very good one.you changed my view. thanks
Reply
very interesting
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Raitokun11 years ago
Thank you for this great tip ;)
Reply
That was a very interesting read, you are simply awesome
Reply
Michael C.11 years ago
Thanks! You can try typing âvolâ instead of âdirâ to see your volume label or serial number
Reply
I always enjoyed reading your articlesâ¦!
Reply
shahrukh2 years ago
Hi, I need a tool to change my hdd serial no. without restarting my pc, Is there any tool avalable for this. If yes please share. Thnaks
Reply
awesome article !
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Leave a Reply
by Mike Turcotte-McCusker on July 19, 2017 in Linux - Last Update: July 22, 2017 - 9 comments
So, I recently purchased a new (used, but new to me) laptop, that had a 1TB 5400RPM Hard Disk in it, granted the laptop is fairly powerful and capable of modern gaming, rendering, and number crunching thanks to a 4th generation i7 CPU and a Dedicated 2GB GDDR5 GPU. However, the HDD seemed to be running awfully slowly, even for a 5400RPM drive.
Iâve been using strictly Solid State Drives for a number of years now, so I admit there was always the possibility of me just having become spoiled, but I thought that perhaps I should look into the health of the drive; after all, a laptop with specs like that should in my eyes run faster so better safe than sorry. This raised the thought to me that perhaps I should write a quick how-to on this procedure for the Ghacks.net community.
This tutorial is done via CLI only, however, there are tools that do the job as well I will briefly cover at the end of this.
Checking the hard drive health in Linux
The tool we are going to be using is called smartmontools (which is also available for Windows and OS X).
The smartmontools package contains two utility programs (smartctl and smartd) to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS and NVMe disks. In many cases, these utilities will provide advanced warning of disk degradation and failure. Smartmontools was originally derived from the Linux âsmartsuite package and actually supports ATA/ATAPI/SATA-3 to -8 disks and SCSI disks and tape devices.
Installing smartmontools
Generally speaking smartmontools is available on most distributions, just install with your given package manager using the package name âsmartmontoolsâ
The How-To
Once that is installed, we need to figure out which drive our questionable one is:
sudo fdisk -l
This will give you a list of all drives and partitions. If you are only using one drive within your machine then itâs going to list /dev/sda and its various partitions. If you have multiple drives, youâll need to use a little bit of common sense in seeing which drive the one you want to inspect, has what on it, and itâs associated listing such as /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc etc.
Once we know the drive we want to check out, there are three tests that we can run, depending on how concerned you are:
The next step is to find out what types of tests our disk supports, as well as an estimate to how long the tests will take to run.
sudo smartctl -c /dev/sdX (replace X with the appropriate letter)
You're going to be given a large amount of output as seen in this screenshot. I've highlighted the areas that were relevant to me for this test; the time estimates, and the fact that my disk does NOT support a conveyance test.
I oped to run the shorter test, just because I heard no clicks or other telltale signs that the hard disk was actually on itâs last legs besides the speed; to which I again state I may just be spoiled by SSDs. You are more than welcome to run that which you feel needed.
The commands for the various tests are (replace sdX with the drive that you want to test)
Note: You will not get any scrolling output for your test beyond being told how long the test will take. If you're running the long test, you may have to wait an hour or two or longer.
Once the test is finished, it's time to get out result!
sudo smartctl -H /dev/sdX
Hopefully you'll see this:
If not, then either some more digging may need to be done, or it might just be time to replace the drive in question.
GUI Tools
There are other options for those of you who avoid the command line, such as the very popular and well known tool gnome-disk-utility (also known as 'disks' by some desktop environments.)
There are numerous other free and paid utilities out there, but I'm not here to advertise, as both of these utilities have served me well in the past for doing quick checks.
Good Luck!
How to check Hard Drive Disk Health in GNU/Linux
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Description
Mike provides you with instructions on checking hard drives connected to a machine running Linux for health related issues.
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Ghacks Technology News
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