How to get hard drive serial number from command line?

From the Windows NT-based (Windows XP and 7 specifically) command prompt, how can I get the serial number of a hard drive as a variable? The one I'm looking at is the serial number of the physical hard disk drive


Solution 1:

Try this command

vol C:

this will get the volume serial number given to it by windows.

wmic diskdrive get serialnumber

this gets the manufacturers serial number of the hard drive.

Solution 2:

In the same vein as Moab's answer, but using PowerShell this time:

Get-CimInstance Win32_DiskDrive | Select-Object Model,SerialNumber

This command gets an instance of the Win32_DiskDrive WMI class and outputs the model of each disk drive in the computer and its corresponding serial number from that instance.

This answer assumes PowerShell 3.0 or later. If running an older version, use Get-WmiObject in place of Get-CimInstance.

On Windows 8 and later, you can also use this command:

Get-PhysicalDisk | Select-Object FriendlyName,SerialNumber

Solution 3:

  • What you are looking at is NOT the hard drive serial number.

  • It is called the Volume Serial Number. It is generated at the time of creating and formatting the volume / partition.

  • You can get it by using a command at command prompt : C:\> vol c: if C: is the drive you want to retrieve the Volume Serial Number for.

  • All you can do is redirect the output of that command to a file : C:\> vol c: > myvol.txt and it will be stored as a text file in your C:

  • I am attaching a screenshot with the highlights:

enter image description here

  • The file was stored in the root of C:

enter image description here

  • This is what the myvol.txt file looks like in Notepad:

enter image description here

Solution 4:

In a batch file one approach is:

  1. VOL command to produce the serial number as text along with text we don't want.
  2. FIND to trim it down to only the line with the serial number.
  3. FOR to grab the 5th token (a part between delimiters) on the line with the serial number.
  4. SET to assign to an environment variable

for /f "tokens=5 delims= " %%a in ('vol c: ^| Find "Serial Number"') do (
set VOLSERIAL=%%a
)