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Unique DiskDrive signature?

I am currently using WMI to request various details about the underlying hardware to uniquely identify the machine. For this purpose, I came across a field called "Signature" under "Win32_DiskDrive". Is this signature unique to all machines (globally)? Can this be used reliably to identify a machine?

Thanks Ananth

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In my experience, this is not always, but can be often enough for your purposes.

My company makes software that, among other things, generates virtual machines from physical machines. One of the problems that we had to solve in this case was how to save the disk signature, since the signature is used by Windows to identify the disk. You can create another disk with the same signature if you know where the signature is stored in the master boot record.

So the answer depends. If you assume that the signature uniquely identifies the machine, and you are faced with a situation where someone cloned a disk or otherwise received a duplicate signature, how will your application respond? How serious will the problem be? If the answer is “not so serious,” it may be good enough for your purposes.

You can also view the MAC address on the device’s Ethernet card. This (more or less) is guaranteed to be unique, and if it has no other problems (for example, ARP resolution problems).

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/1306674/

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