When this FingerPrint option flag is set, the hard drive on the host machine is queried for its full (hardware) serial number. 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.