Changing your hardware address can be a pain in the Microsoft world. Because of some wireless testing purposes I needed to change my built in hardware address or MAC (media access control) address in my Windows 7 distribution.
I will not go into what is the MAC address (you should be familiar with this term if you are reading something like this), I presume your first thought about this is: “He has to change his MAC address because he is doing something baaad:) Well, there could be a number of legitimate reasons why would you change your built in hardware address. Maybe your computer died which was connected directly to the ISP and that address was needed to authenticate or identify you or maybe you are worried about your privacy. If you were connected to the internet in a public web cafe, then you could be easily targeted by a hacker.
It’s pretty simple to change the MAC address in Linux, but in Windows (especially Win7) it’s a little tricky. You could change it in the registry, use different applications to change it, use different drivers and so on…
After looking around, I have found an application that worked for my Intel 5100 AGN wireless adapter in combination with the MS Win7. App is called Etherchange and you can find it on ntsecurity.nu website or HERE!
After downloading the app, put it in the root partition of your Win7 distribution (in my case it’s the C drive).
First thing you should do is see which is your current MAC address of the wifi card. In command promp (Win Run+type cmd and enter) type: ipconfig /all and find your mac. My ends in 10, and the plan is that it ends in 11 after the transformation:)
Then type etherchange.exe and press enter. From here you will be guided to change the MAC address.
As said, after entering the new address disable and re-enable the network adapter for the change to take place. Then again type ipconfig /all to see if you network adapter has the new MAC address.
You can use this app for any network adapter, but my mission here was the wifi adapter:)
Hope it helped!
hi, i tried the above process but in the command prompt when i try to specify a new address it says ‘illegal address. try again’
What can be the possible solutions?
Hi, are you entering the new address in hex? Try entering new address to be similar to the original one – like 08-00-27-00-5C-D7 to 00-0F-21-00-5C-D7…or try the advanced settings of you wifi adapter in the device manager because some wifi adapters can change it there.
Make sure you are entering the mac WITHOUT the separators, i.e. 08-00-27-00-5C-D7 would be 080027005CD7.
thank you for your great effort;
I have a problem that when entering the new address in hex begin with any value except 02 it does not change and I need to change it to begin with 8C;
What can be the possible solutions?
Feel free to contact me via e-mail – tino.sokic at itino.net
Hey tino, You must mention in your post about the windows 7 bug/protection of spoofing mac address of wireless adapters, The first octet has to be 02,8A,DE,CA,E6,BE,16,A6,AE…. aND the rest can be of user’s choice!! It’s pretty annoying!
hey i have tried this one! but when coming to the section of the command prompt it is saying -“cannot work with this version or windows , insufficient permission or unknown error”
can u help me out for the same!?
Are you Win administrator?
it is too old thread.. but i wanted to try the same. The link is dead. Can you please check if you still have access?