System Hard Drive No FingerPrint Flag

SoftwareShield System Feature Guide > FingerPrinting / Machine Locking > FingerPrint Option Flags > System Hard Drive Serial No. FingerPrint Flag

## System Hard Drive Serial No. FingerPrint Flag

When this FingerPrint option flag is set, it will query the Hard Drive on which the operating system is installed for its hardware serial number. The Hard Drive where the operating system is installed is the least likely to change. We suggest you use this flag over the ”Hard Drive Serial Number” alone (which retrieves the Serial Number from the first Hard Drive it finds). Some generic hard drives may not respond to the query with their serial number. However, we have found that this is only in extremely rare cases. Virtually every drive type responds correctly with its actual hardware serial number. This value is physically stored in hardware and cannot be changed in software.

### Typical Internal Values

- "Y31AP96E"

- "CSF50-658787J-00021E"

### Operating System and Security

This flag will be able to successfully query the hard drive serial number on Windows 2000, NT and XP. It will return an empty value in Win9x. The current user must be logged in with administrative privileges or it will return an empty value.

NOTE: When the operating system does not support the option or the option cannot execute properly due to insufficient user privileges, the option simply returns an empty value. This is not an error condition and the FingerPrinting mechanism will continue to work on that machine, except the uniqueness of the FingerPrint is somewhat diminished. For this reason, it is always best to combine a few FingerPrint options instead of using just one.