Why does one usb flash drive have different serial numbers in different operating systems?

Solution 1:

• It is possible that one of the tools shows the serial number of the adapter, and the other tool shows serial number of the disk.

  I like lsblk. You find the output options via lsblk --help and man lsblk.

• Some tools seem to truncate or mix the information about model and serial number.

In Ubuntu there are several commands that show similar information, and you can run them yourself and check if some of them match between each other and with the Windows tool.

usb-devices | grep -iA2 manufacturer

LANG=C sudo parted -ls | grep -A1 Model:

lsblk -do name,model,serial

# and for each interesting device sdx

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id | grep sdb$  # e.g. for device sdb

sudo lshw|less  # and scroll down to find info about the device