How can I change the MAC address of a network bridge in Windows?

Question

I use DHCP reservation rather than static IP for convenience, and that relies on the MAC address of my computer.

I recently bridged my main adapter with my VirtualBox adapter. When things stopped working, I realized that the MAC address is now different. Is there some way to keep it the same every time I bridge or unbridge or do I need to reconfigure the router every time?

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 05 '17 at 09:10

8

To change the MAC Address of a network adapter manually:

Open the Registry Editor:

Navigate to the folowing key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

Go through the numbered subkeys until you find one that matches your network adapter configuration. Modify the value named NetworkAddress to reflect the desired MAC address, but without hyphens/colons, if you want 00-B3-A0-03-00-1F, set the value to 00B3A003001F.

It's possible that NetworkAddress may not exist, if so - create the key as a 'New' -> 'String Value'.

Once that's done, you need to disable/enable the network adapter in the Network Connections settings page for the change to take effect.

Reference to original article is here

edited Dec 05 '17 at 09:10

caesay

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answered Dec 30 '11 at 23:07

Mathias R. Jessen

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[Are answers that just contain links elsewhere really good answers](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/are-answers-that-just-contain-links-elsewhere-really-good-answers) – jscott Dec 31 '11 at 00:29
Good point jscott, let me clear this mess up – Mathias R. Jessen Dec 31 '11 at 00:38
@jscott Better? :-) – Mathias R. Jessen Dec 31 '11 at 00:47
Yes, much actually and +1. – jscott Dec 31 '11 at 01:41

How can I change the MAC address of a network bridge in Windows?

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