“Tools” required:

1 formatted floppy disk

1 USB key or CD-R
1 hour of your time (maybe more, maybe less)

1 trial version of WinImage

1 copy of the DST (Dell Service Tag) utility from a friendly guy’s site

As a project for work my boss wanted me to find a way to set/reset service tags on a few of the (thousand+) Dell PCs the business owns. The main concern was that the motherboards had been replaced and by default come with a blank service tag, and since we use the service tag internally for both warranty tracking as well as asset tracking so having a motherboard that doesn’t have a tag proves difficult to manage and introduces overhead that the big bosses don’t like. Enter Google, I hunt around for a while but can’t really find anything concrete, most places assume that everything BUT the service tag can be changed, until I stumble upon a post in Dell’s own forums alleging a way to change the tags. I read through the post here, and followed the links but didn’t have a floppy handy and really didn’t want to make my fellow interns in other business units have to hunt up a floppy either, so I searched for a way to make the tool run from USB. I did end up actually having to locate a floppy, but I only needed one, and once you’ve made an image of the floppy that the Dell utility creates using WinImage you don’t have to touch the floppy again.

But luckily since I started this post ages ago I found an easier way. One of the Dell techs that occasionally comes by to replace laptop motherboards for us left us a BIOS update CD. Normally we just download the updates from Dell if the need arises, but one day my USB service tag switcher wasn’t working (this was on a newer laptop). I was getting frustrated but then I wondered if perhaps the version of the service tag switcher I’d downloaded was out of date, after some head scratching and digging through my desk I found the CD the Dell tech gave me and popped it in, did some hunting around the directories on the CD and found my way to the service tag switcher that is included. I ran it and lo and behold it worked. So rather than force everybody to follow these arcane instructions I’ll add a link to the BIOS Update CD to this post when I can find time to upload a copy.