P2V - hard drive serial

[anthoferd]

Hello together,

I am testing vmware workstation pro for a new solution for our customers. e. g. they have an old windows xp pc and the software on this pc (plc visualization, etc.) is no longer available on the market. So when the pc is dead, they have invest many thousand euros for a new pc, the new software and often they have to change they whole controller hardware at their plant.

Now I want to test a cheaper solution with vmware workstation. It's important, to clone the pc with all uuids, mac addresses, etc. so that the software run after the conversion without new activation.

I can't re-activate the software, because the software is no longer available on the market.

I have done the following steps:

1. Create Backup with Acronis

2. Create virtual machine in workstation pro 12.5

3. Start vm with Acronis and recover from the backup to the new virtual machine

4. stop vm and convert id with vcenter converter

5. change the uuid.bios to the original uuid of the physical machine

6. change the mac address to the original mac of the physical machine

All works fine, but after startup the visualization software want to activate. So I found out, that the hard disk serial is not equal.

with

wmic diskdrive get serialnumber

I get a long number. In the vmdk file I found ddb.longContentID and ddb.uuid. Is there a way to set the serialnumber from thy physical hard drive to the vmdk file?

Thanks a lot.

[bluefirestorm]

Are you sure that the software is checking for the hardware serial number or the volume serial number?

Hardware serial number is the one you see in SerialNumber from wmic disk get. It looks like this is S.M.A.R.T. related implementation.

Volume serial number is eight character serial as seen from command line dir command. This is OS dependent. Do a dir /p on the volume where the software is installed.

If it is volume serial number then possibly the Sysinternals VolumeID tool might be of help.

[scerazy]

You want to use:

wmic path win32_physicalmedia get Tag,SerialNumber

That is the actual physical HDD serial number

I do not think Vmware has this options

Virtualbox does have HardDisk UUID= which controls HDD serial no, but one can not specify an exact serial in vbox config

Inside OS the above command returns VBxxxxxxxx-yyyyyyyy (where x are first 8 characters & y are the last 8 characters of that UUID but y are in reverse order)

Nothing ever is tied to Volume SN (which changes during OS install), unless it was written by primary school kid!

You could try from Github hdsnspoofer

Seb