Microsoft Autopilot simplifies the deployment and configuration of Windows devices by leveraging a hardware hash to uniquely identify each device. Understanding how to decode and validate the HW hash is crucial for troubleshooting and ensuring successful enrollment. This article walks you through the process of decoding and validating Autopilot HW hash.
Table of Contents
What is a Hardware Hash?
The HW hash is a unique identifier that combines multiple hardware characteristics of a Windows device. It includes details such as:
- Serial number
- TPM details
- Hardware IDs for critical components
This information ensures that each device is uniquely identifiable during the Autopilot registration process.
Tool used to decode hardware hash
The tool that will be used to decode and validate the HW hash is “OA 3.0 Tool”
The OA 3.0 tool is a command-line tool that supports assembling, reporting, and returning a unique identifier for the computers on the factory floor.
To get the OA3 tool, will need to download and install the The Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK), which can be downloaded from here “Download and install the Windows ADK | Microsoft Learn“
Start the installation and choose the following features to install, once done the OA3 tool “oa3tool.exe” can be found in this path “C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Deployment Tools\amd64\Licensing\OA30”
Get Hardware hash
To get HW hash from the device you can either collect it manually using the following doc “Collect the hardware hash“
Or it is included in mdmdiagnostics logs that is collected using the command
mdmdiagnosticstool.exe -area “DeviceEnrollment;DeviceProvisioning;Autopilot” -zip “c:\users\public\documents\MDMDiagReport.zip”
The ZIP file will include the HW hash, a csv file with the device name, the file include serial number of the device and the HW hash code
Validate and Decode the hardware hash
- Copy the HW hash from the CSV file
- Run the following commands in CMD to access folder for the OA30 tool:
- cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Deployment Tools\amd64\Licensing\OA30
- To decode the HW hash run the following command
- OA3Tool.exe /DecodeHwHash=”Paste the HW hash from CSVfile”
The result
- To validate the HW hash run the following command
- OA3Tool.exe /validateHwHash=”Paste the HW hash from CSVfile”
result which can contains error which means that the HW hash is not valid and may result in failed to import or Autopilot failed to complete
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