virtualbox.org

Is there any way to change the BIOS serial number of an image in VirtualBox? Someone suggested a command like this:

vboxmanage setextradata "Demo Server" VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiSerial "12345"

I tried it and it ran with no errors, but I got this error when loading the image:

Failed to start the virtual machine Demo Server. 
Invalid configuration for device pcbios device 
(VERR_PDM_DEVINS_UNKNOWN_CFG_VALUES). 
Unknown error creating VM 
(VERR_PDM_DEVINS_UNKNOWN_CFG_VALUES).

Any ideas would be appreciated.

I believe your parameter is wrong, I think it should read
VBoxManage setextradata "Demo Server" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/DmiBIOSSerial" "12345"

I am still hoping I can get information regarding such undocumented parameters. I'm being patient. But analyzing the commands that are documented in the manual and here on this forum I would think my suggestion is a better fit than what you used.

By the way, why would you want to change the BIOS serial number?

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion, but no go - I got the same error.

I'm trying to do this because I have an application that does hardware and software inventory of PCs, and it uses the BIOS serial to uniquely identify each machine.

It probably didn't work the second time, because the erroneous entries in the VM's xml file are still there. Try to remove these erroneous entries and try again.
If you haven't already done so, make a backup of the good copy before continuing with experimenting. I myself had to learn the hard way.

I always recreate from scratch, so that's not it, unfortunately.