Serial Physical HD

I work for sevaral local companies here in Guatemala with Data Centers, and some of them had old software that only can run on the specific disk that was installed. The problem they had is that if they need to change the computer they need to use the same disk, but sometimes the disks are on different technologies, or simply the disk is broken and they need to reinstall the app like if it was in the original computer where the vendor (who no exists anymore since early 2000s) installed the software, so we change the serial number of the HDD and that is it, they take the computer to work again.