VolumeID by Mark Russinovich, is another freeware tool that helps you to change the Volume IDs of drives from command line window.Ģ.

Option 1: Using Sysinternals VolumeID changer. How to change HDD Volume Serial Number (VolumeID). In this article you will find detailed instructions on how to change the hard drive's Volume Serial Number (aka Volume ID or VSN).

Nowadays, this method is useless because the game or software vendors now use the hardcoded serial number (HDD Manufacture's S/N that is embedded into the firmware) to identify (ban) cheaters or they ban the CD key. Also this technique was previously used by multiplayer game vendors to ban the gamers that tried to cheat. This means that software from these vendors can not run if the Volume Serial Number is different from the VSN of the product's original optical disk that was shipped or of the hard drive that the software was first installed. Taking advantage of VSN, some software vendors use the Volume Serial Number to avoid pirate copying of their products. The VSN is changed anytime you format the disk, so if you re-install Windows and you format the system disk, Windows will ask again for activation. In simple words, the Volume Serial Number indicates the exact time of format operation. To bypass this problem, Microsoft and IBM decided to assign a new unique number in hexadecimal form (called 'Volume Serial Number' or 'Volume ID' or 'VSN') when a drive (optical disk or hard drive) was formatted. But that way, there was a problem if a user gave the same (Volume) name to two (or more) disks. By that time the only way to determine this, was the volume label (Volume Name) that the user defined to each storage disk. The Volume Serial Number was added by Microsoft and IBM so that the operating system could recognize if an optical disk or a drive is changed on the system. The Volume Serial Number (also known as VSN) is a unique serial number that is assigned to an optical disk (CD or DVD) or a hard drive after formatting.

Windows 8 serial number only 22