What is system uuid on windows and why cant it be easily changed

7

I was installing some software and it said that the locking criteria is the system UUID. Now I know what UUID stands for. I know they are unique and are 128 bits long. I know how to generate them from a windows power shell. But my question is what is the system UUID on a windows 7 machine. Where is it stored. And what is the purpose behind having a UUID for every computer? Could someone please clear these doubts for me? What are they used for apart from verifying that the same software is not installed again on the same computer?

Sab

Posted 2013-07-28T02:17:23.940

Reputation: 367

Hm, there are multiple IDs here. First of all every Windows machine has a machine security identifier (SID) and if it is domain joined it gets a domain-sid as well. To change the first one the system must be rebooted with the sysprep tool, the second one changes when you register the machine in the domain. Both are not real UUIDs (but unique IDs). There is a hardware machine UUID (in fact I think multiple), there is the network card MACs, there are filesystem and disk IDs and many more.. – eckes – 2017-06-07T19:56:21.643

The UUID in the mainboard is used I think for windows activation as well (wmic csproduct get UUID). Not beeing able to change them is to make spoofing harder, to reduce accidents and because some stuff depends on it. It is not clear which UUID is the one you care about. However if you are entitled to move the software then your vendor should tell you how, dont crack it. – eckes – 2017-06-07T19:56:27.667

Answers

2

System UUID cannot be changed : it depends upon the hardware. It is determined at creation time by the hypervisor : KVM, Hyper-V, VMWare, ...

You can get the UUID this way :

On Windows

cmd.exe

wmic csproduct get UUID

Powershell

Get-WmiObject -Class "Win32_ComputerSystemProduct" | Select-Object -Property UUID

On Linux based Systems

#! /bin/sh
dmidecode -s system-uuid

MUY Belgium

Posted 2013-07-28T02:17:23.940

Reputation: 265

It should be noted that both commands need to be executed with supervisor privileges. – zx485 – 2019-03-18T22:27:59.943

I have a problem with my KVM, UUID on windows are not identical... – MUY Belgium – 2019-09-20T08:34:29.657

"System UUID cannot be changed" - Not true. Programs like Ghost, which is used to clone workstations from a master image, change the UUID for each newly installed image. If the UUID was not changed, then a workstation would encounter obscure errors when trying to join the domain. – jww – 2019-09-22T05:37:19.970

Asked: 2013-07-28T02:17:23.940

Viewed: 13 038 times

Active: 2019-07-08T22:30:56.813