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I bought a new solid state drive, cloned the old one to the new using CloneDrive, removed the old drive and booted. Everything went well, but when I tried to start Unity I got this popup:

Machine identification is invalid for current license

I am currently just toying around with the free version anyway, so this is no problem to me, but I guess it could be quite troublesome when someone would be in the middle of an actual project with the paid version.

It seems like replacing your hard drive invalidates your Unity license. What other changes to the PC hardware can cause this to happen?

I do not want to know how Unity detects hardware changes, I want to know which kind of hardware changes need to be avoided to prevent Unity from causing trouble which might lead to disruption of a project schedule.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about the techniques a particular game engine uses for copy protection. This is not in scope for game development. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Mar 14, 2015 at 16:08
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Byte56 I think questions about how to use software used for game development are very on-topic here. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Mar 14, 2015 at 16:33
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    \$\begingroup\$ How to use the software, and what aspects of your computer it looks at for identification are different things. Using Unity has nothing to do with what hardware you can swap out of a machine before the license complains. If you really need to know this to complete your work with Unity, I suggest you contact the support email listed in your error message. Microsoft has a similar "major hardware change" policy for Windows activation, you can look more into that if it'll help. It's simply another component of copy protection. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Mar 14, 2015 at 16:41
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Byte56 Thank you for reminding me that arguing with mods is pointless. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Mar 14, 2015 at 17:03
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    \$\begingroup\$ I made a meta-question about what sort of tools questions are acceptable. Let's argue there. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Mar 15, 2015 at 17:44

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