Duplicate UUID / BIOS GUID & Serial Numbers

[CHiLL]

We have about 100 Ergo Hybrid 101 "B25" tablets (which use a "B25_MB_VD" motherboard). These tablets don't have Ethernet and only have 1x USB 3.0 port. Over the past couple of years we have been imaging these via SCCM with an offline/bootable USB Task Sequence. This method is infuriating because these devices will often corrupt the USB drive at a random point during the imaging process, requiring me to have to recreate the offline media and start the imaging process again from scratch. Not ideal, given that these devices are very slow. So I've recently purchased a USB 3.0 hub with Gigabit Ethernet adapter, with the idea to simply have SCCM boot media and use the network to then connect to SCCM. I have gotten this to work (after days of painstaking tinkering)...but ran into the last stumbling block...the UUID/BIOS GUID!

 

It turns out that all of our Ergo devices have the same serial number (1234567890) and UUID/BIOS GUID (12345678-1234-5678-90AB-CDDEEFAABBCC) hardcoded into the BIOS. This means that when WinPE boots and connects to SCCM, it checks the UUID against it's database to see if it exists. If it does exist, it won't issue it with a TS and show the error: "There are no task sequences available for this computer.". If the UUID does not exist, it will be presented with the TS selection list.

 

This is driving me mad because I have approximately 100 of these, so of course that UUID is going to appear in SCCM's database.

 

Is there a way to change the UUID or serial number in the very limited BIOS of these devices?

 

I've contacted Ergo to see if there's a BIOS update or something for these devices that may solve the issue, but been bounced around their hardware team, infrastructure support team, CMS/Zoostorm support and now back to Ergo and waiting for a response.

[difinity]

I don't think there is a way to easily chance the UUID/GUID if there is no BIOS update but there does seem to be a way round it. There looks to be some links for a SCCM workaround in this thread. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/configurationmgr/2010/04/12/osd-task-sequence-fails-with-there-are-no-task-sequences-available-for-this-computer-if-multiple-machines-have-the-same-smbios-guid/

[SYNACK]

http://www.edugeek.net/blogs/synack/54-dmi-discontinuity-perils-brand-x-computing.html

 

Any help?

[CHiLL]

Thanks for the responses. Turns out I've managed to crack this with quite a simple solution. I created a new collection in SCCM with the following query:

select

SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceID,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceType,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Name,SMS_R_SYSTEM.SMSUniqueIdentifier,SMS_R_SYSTEM.ResourceDomainORWorkgroup,SMS_R_SYSTEM.Client from SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.SMBIOSGUID = "12345678-1234-5678-90AB-CDDEEFAABBCC"

This collection will pick up all devices with the same UUID/SMBIOS GUID. I then deployed the specific Task Sequence to this collection and only made it available to media/PXE (so it won't appear in Software Centre).

 

When I booted the device, it picked up this TS and started imaging. Great start to the morning!