I bought a mystery laptop, help!

[shadowphile]

I bought this used HP laptop but the configuration is a mystery to me.
It has no serial number or service tag, outside or inside or in the BIOS. Even the online HP device detection process comes up with a blank serial number.
I started out trying to fix the issue preventing certain function-keys from working, and that process led me down a rabbit-hole.
HP Elitebook 8740w with Win7. It is a workhorse; Nvidia Quadro video card and a 10-bit Dreamcolor display, active HD shock-protection, gobs of ports, including a smart-card slot, fingerprint scanner, dual joy-button/touchpad devices. Think big and heavy like a gamer's laptop but for serious work. Not good at all in today's world of ultralights but a great mobile workstation for heavy media or engineering work.
This is a four-year old model but the specs are still very good by today's standards (for the $250 I paid for it).

No serial number: Is this like a gun with the serial number filed off?
It only has a bare-bones OS installation with some basic utilities.
No recovery partition. I received only a power supply and laptop.
The BIOS is very extensive and has a lot of security-looking fields I have never seen before. There was also supposed to be a lot of OS-level security software.

My guess is that it was a decommissioned corporate machine (if it is not stolen).

Right now my best solution is to clone the drive to an external disk; without drivers and recovery disks I can not do a clean OS install. Without a serial number or service tag I cannot identify the exact hardware configuration, which leaves me with no way to maintain it..

Any ideas what I am dealing with here?
thanks

 

[hang-the-9]

There are a few cases where the serial # may be missing from the BIOS. Motherboard was replaced and not setup, or someone used an HP technician utility boot and deleted it.

It seems like the system was stolen and whoever did it wiped the S/N from it, I doubt it was just an re-sold corporate system. In my 20+ years in IT work, I ran across a system with a missing S/N maybe twice that I can remember that came from just a config issue, but combining that with no serial numbers on the case sure does scream "I was stolen" to me.

The Elitebooks have good driver support, just install Windows on it, and anything not showing up at installed in Device Manager you can look up the hardware ID code and match it to the drivers HP has.

I would return it though, there are quite a few programs that read the S/N info from the system and may not install. There is a S/N that should be printed on the motherboard, but that may not match up to the S/N of the overall laptop. Just tell whoever you got it from that the system is not good without the serial number, and since you probably have their info as to who they are, not taking it back would open up the option of you going to the police with it and saying "so this guy sold me what looks to be a hot laptop, can you look into it".