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?

Solution

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

Comments

[jscott]

Are answers that just contain links elsewhere really good answers

[Mathias R. Jessen]

Good point jscott, let me clear this mess up

[Mathias R. Jessen]

@jscott Better? :-)

[jscott]

Yes, much actually and +1.