A few years ago, I wrote an article explaining how to change the volume serial number.
This program does not work properly now under Windows Vista or Windows 7 unless executed as administrator. Following many suggestions, I updated the tool to support the latest Windows version.
Please note that after you change the serial number you may need to reboot the PC for the settings to take effect.
Download:
Note: You may need to download and install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86).
Are you willing to share the new codes that cover the windows 7 as you did a few years ago?
The same code should work on Windows 7. Just run the tool as admin. Please try and let me know.
As long as you have FAT or NTFS it should work.
Hi Elias,
Great tool!
I used your code ;)) to write a tool that extracts the volume serial number and the volume label without changing anything from command line.
Windows has the command “VOL” (part of cmd.exe) but the problem comes when a user has its OS in a Non-English language and VOL give the output messages in that language, being hard to extract correctly the required data with a script. I still can use GAWK for that, but for sure in Japanese/Russian will give some errors :((
Thank you very much! (see sourceforge project winlocate v0.1.6)
Please download the source code now and try to compile again
Elias, could you reupload the file? It got removed.
Please try now. I uploaded to GitHub.
Thank you!
It seems on W8/8.1 there is no way to write anything into bootsector even with administrator rights. I believe it is a good decision.
I agree with you. I think this is due to secure boot and UEFI…
Not necessarily because I don’t have both on my computers.
Oo, I remember the same behavior on Win7. When I was need to modify bootsector under Win7 I found a workaround, it is described here http://bbs.ipauly.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1985.
Thanks, good to know.
So I guess that this approach won’t work with a disk that is online and which you cannot take offline (like the OS drive), right?
I didn’t manage to replace a boot sector on even offline drive (which was seen by BOOTICE ofc). I had to ‘clean’ disk (to remove MBR primarily I believe but I didn’t research further).