Get HDD serial numbers using Powershell

Question

I am archiving a large number of HDD's at my company, and I have a powershell script that grabs the hostname and user list from a Windows OS installation, and I would like to programatically find the serial number of the drive as well. I have the following bit of Powershell code (mostly completed) that should do this, but there's a complication as well.

$Disks = Get-WMIObject -class win32_PhysicalMedia
$SerialNumber = foreach($Disk in $Disks) {IF ($Disk.SerialNumber -ne '     WD-WCC2EAV91692') {[do something here]}}

I am connecting the drives with a USB HDD dock, and it seems that if the computer is booted with the drive connected internally (via SATA cables, I haven't tested externally yet), then the SerialNumber field is populated. However, if I connect it after the computer has booted up, the SerialNumber field is always blank. Is there a way to have the computer re-scan for this info when I connect the drive, or is this info only gathered at boot-up, for example, by the BIOS or something?

Answer 1

AFAIK the SerialNumber is optional and provided by the driver. So if the USB-dock driver is not providing the information to Windows, then there's no easy way to retrieve it.

Answer 2

This thread (look for "Maxim Shatskih") says that IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH is supported by USBSTOR, so it would be possible to write or find a program that can get the serial number from a USB attached drive, by passing the appropriate SCSI command to the drive (get mode page 80h).

A package that may do what you need is sg3_utils for Windows (it was originally written for Linux but ported to Windows).

Answer 3

I just tested booting the computer up with the HDD in the USB dock, and I got the same result. Technically, the SerialNumber field wasn't blank, but was all zero's instead of the actual serial number, which is probably just the same difference. It's seeming like it may be more work than it's worth to do this as a part of the script (assuming it's even possible), so I will likely just continue scanning the SN barcode into the script. It's an extra step, but only takes a couple seconds.

Thanks everyone for the input.