If you're talking about home computers, I haven't seen a restore disc included in about 4 years. At most (and even more annoyingly), I've seen them include a friggin' picture of the restore disc on a little glossy piece of paper, informing you how you can order one.


I believe (correct me if I'm wrong, people), that the disc sees a special partition on the drive for verification.

In my experience, it checks the DMI (or BIOS) data. There are fields specifically for "Manufacturer".

The DMI check would be the basic one that prevents you from going past the initial screen on a recovery disc. The actual activation of Windows has moved on now. I've not seen a partition check though.

Vista and Windows 7 use special certificates called SLICs which are embedded into the BIOS now. Each manufacturer gets a SLIC for each edition of Windows they bundle. This hasn't stopped people since there seems to be a growing number who modify their BIOS to include one of many OEM Windows SLICs.

nVidia SLI support uses a similar mechanism to enable itself on non nVidia chipsets. If the manufacturer pays the necessary license fee then they include the certificate into the BIOS. Again, people have been busy modifying their BIOS to enable this.

Well, regardless of the details, it's all BIOS/firmware related, and replacing a hard drive doesn't make it impossible to recover from those discs.

Wow, this reminds me of someone trying putting a lock on a chain-link fence to keep out flood waters.

Pretty much. At least breaking in via the serial number route is usually detectable from either using a known bad key or detecting all the patches to the activation system. The OEM activation method however isn't quite as easy to detect unless they start messing around with a big table of known BIOS hashes or known hardware for each OEM config.

They'd likely come out ahead if they just stopped bothering.