Is it possible to ghost/clone a drive to a new hard drive without overwriting the new hard drive's volume serial number?
Here is my situation: I have loaded XP and several third party programs onto a test station without licensing any of the programs. I then want to clone this test station as a "Golden" image, and then use the "Golden" image to clone 7 other test stations, where they would then be licensed with individual keys/serial numbers.
This works, however I found that after making the "Golden" image of test station 1 (TS1), and pushing the image to test station 2 (TS2), the volume label on the hard drive in TS2 was replaced with the volume label from TS1. This is causing a licensing issue with my third party software, as the software keys off of the volume label when registering the product. I need to be able to push the cloned image to a new hard drive without replacing that hard drive's volume serial number.
I am aware that some freeware applications can change volume serial numbers after the fact, but this is very problematic for me. It is very, very difficult to get freeware products approved for use within my program, so those options are effectively off the table.
So, is it possible, when restoring an image to a new hard drive, to leave the new hard drive's volume serial number in tact? Perhaps an option somewhere in the GUI that I'm overlooking?
Thanks in advance.