Use this trick to get the serial number of your hard drive in Windows 10 + 8 & 7 without physically taking it out and looking at the sticker!
It’s really simple and only takes a second if you follow these instructions!
1. Open an elevated CMD prompt:
Click the “Start” button and type in “CMD”.
Right-click the Command Prompt suggestion and choose “Run as administrator”.
2. Copy and paste this command and hit Enter:
wmic diskdrive get Name, Manufacturer, Model, InterfaceType, MediaType, SerialNumber
3. You can now see the serial number(s) and more details about the hard disk(s) on your system!
“But what if I have more than one disk of the same model in my list?”, you ask.
“How can I know which disk has which serial number?”
Simple!
Look at the “NAME” parameter and then click “Start” and type in “Disk Management”.
Select “Create and format hard disk partitions”.
Sometimes it takes a while to load.
Once it has loaded, check the table below the lists of disks in Disk Management which shows the disks and partitions as horizontal boxes.
Now compare the number in the “NAME” parameter with the with the number after “Disk” to check which disk matches which name, and what drive letter it has been assigned. In this case “D:”.
In this case you can see that Disk 1 is the same as “\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1”.
This command uses the built-in WMIC tool to query WMI information about hardware installed and configured by Windows.
WMI is basically a database containing all kinds of details about your PC, as Windows sees it.
The above WMIC command can be used with more parameters, so in case you’re looking for other details from the Win32_DiskDrive class, check out Microsoft’s official Win32_DiskDrive class documentation.
The equivalent command in PowerShell for the above command is:
Get-WMIObject win32_physicalmedia | Format-List Tag,SerialNumber
Copy and paste this into a Windows PowerShell command window and you’ll get the serial number and physical disk number just like above.
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-Tommy