Apparatus and method for protecting system serial number while allowing motherboard replacement

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for changing the serial number of a replacement motherboard to that of a malfunctioning motherboard thus ensuring that application software are able to be executed on the workstation without interruption while providing assurances to software vendors that the workstation is permitted to run the application software. In an embodiment of the invention, an uninitialized serial number is stored in memory of the replacement motherboard at manufacture time. Once the replacement board is used to replace a malfunctioning motherboard, the uninitialized serial number is initialized by being replaced with the serial number of the malfunctioning motherboard. After initialization, no changes are permitted. In another embodiment of the invention, the workstation is forced to be rebooted after initialization. Here, however, changes to the initialized serial number will be allowed so long as the workstation has not been rebooted.