duplicate uuid

Question

We've had to replace a lot of GX270 motherboards hit by the bad capacitor plague.  Now we're finding when we reimage them there are a bunch with duplicate guid's.  Anyone else ever have this happen?  And any idea's as to why/how?? Thanks!!!

speedstep · Answer

@prof frink wrote:

We've had to replace a lot of GX270 motherboards hit by the bad capacitor plague. Now we're finding when we reimage them there are a bunch with duplicate guid's.

Anyone else ever have this happen? And any idea's as to why/how??

Thanks!!!

The imaging is the problem.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NewSid.html

Many organizations use disk image cloning to perform mass rollouts of Windows. This technique involves copying the disks of a fully installed and configured Windows computer onto the disk drives of other computers. These other computers effectively appear to have been through the same install process, and are immediately available for use.

While this method saves hours of work and hassle over other rollout approaches, it has the major problem that every cloned system has an identical Computer Security Identifier (SID). This fact compromises security in Workgroup environments, and removable media security can also be compromised in networks with multiple identical computer SIDs.

Demand from the Windows community has lead PowerQuest, Ghost Software and Altiris to develop programs that can change a computer's SID after a system has been cloned. However, PowerQuest's SID Changer and Ghost Software's Ghost Walker are only sold as part of each company's high-end product. Further, they both run from a DOS command prompt (Altiris' changer is similar to NewSID).

snldavis · Answer

We have run into this same problem.  We use RIS to reimage our PCs.  After much searching, I finally found the answer in a discussion group that is not on the Dell site.  On the Dell systems, apparently part of the information taken in order to determine the guid for a particular system is the asset tag (service tag #).  When you get a new system from Dell, this is set at the factory.  However, when you get a motherboard replacement, this information is the same on every motherboard.  The way you can change this is to download the Dell System Utilites vA14 for multiple OS/multiple systems, and get a utility off of that diskette called asset.com.  These particular utilities are dated 9/26/01, which is older than these systems, but this is what I was pointed to and they worked for me.  You need a bootable diskette with the asset.com utility on it.  Boot to that diskette, and run the command:   asset /s nnnnnn   where nnnnnn is the unique service tag number on your PC.  This will resolve the duplicate guid problem.   I was unable to find this by searching for 'duplicate guid' on the Dell support site, or by looking for downloads for my particular system.  I was only able to locate the answer using google to search the Internet.    The link for this download is:   http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/format.aspx?releaseid=R21706&c=us&l=en&cs=&s=gen   Some of the people at Dell techinical support will tell you that the technician that replaces your motherboard should run this (to give you a new motherboard in the same condition as the one you originally received from Dell), but the technicians have never heard of it and don't have the utility, at least at our location.

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duplicate uuid

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