Disk ID, Volume ID and Tools to Change

There are several types of IDs for harddisks and volumes which you normally don’t notice and don’t need to know about.

Disk ID

Windows attaches a disk id it to every disk – not volume – it uses. You can look at it and change it with the command line tool diskpart which comes with Windows.

Open a cmd shell as admin, then

diskpart           starts it, it shows a prompt like `DISKPART>'
list disk          shows a list of phyisical disks, not volumes 
select disk 1      selects disk 1 as the 'current' disk
uniqueid disk      shows the disk id

uniqueid disk=[new id]  change disk id of the selected disk
help uniqueid disk   help for uniqueid command, shows 
                     details of [new id] in line above

     more possibilities of diskpart 
help             shows list of commands
list             shows help for the list command
list volume      all volumes of the computer
list partition   partitions of the selected disk

Volume ID

A volume id is attached to a partition or volume on a drive. How can you see the volume id of a drive?
open a cmd shell, then vol d: shows the name and volume id of drive d:.

Though you can do alot of stuff with the above mentioned diskpart, you cannot view or change a volume id with it. But you can download VolumeId, a tool from MS, which does just this: Change a volume id of a volume. Usage is easy, you need to open a cmd shell as admin and then

volumeid e: 1A34-AB27

changes the volume’s id to the value 1A34-AB27.