Is there a way, either by a command or editing a configuration file, to manually set the serial number reported by the BIOS? I've been able to do this with both VirtualPC and VMWare and was hoping the same functionality was available within Parallels (which is currently my virualization software of choice). The field is populated with a value - specifically Parallels - but this is too long to use properly within our processes. Note that you'll also lose data on additional drives to. Your BIOS serial number should be changed. The problem occurs when attempting to read the same fields from WMI on a parallels virtual machine. Answer: Press 'F1,' 'F2,' 'F12' or 'Del' to enter setup mode.
For all of our physical machines, this works extremely well as all of the big manufacturers provide unique IDs that can be read through WMI. In order to manage the devices in our environment efficiently, we store records of each device based on the serial number found within the BIOS. I'm in the process of trying to convert our standard desktop image to a parallels virtual machine and have had great success in getting it up and running, connecting to the domain, all devices installed, etc.
