Getting Hard Drive Serial Numbers using scripts

Recently I had been working on a way to retrieve hard drive serial numbers without having to go around and look at each drive.  We have to use them for reports and we use equipment from sites that we go to that doesn’t belong to us so a kept list is not an option.  There is software out there that will do it for you and make a nice little report, but our highers up think that is a bad idea and we can just go around a physically look at each drive.  So this has been something we have done for a while.  Well in my efforts to be a lazy admin I found a few things and wrote two scripts.

The first is a vbscript that will write the hard drive serial to a text file along with the host name of the machine.  It calls on WMI to provide the drive serial.  However it only worked with Windows 7 and server 2008.  I didn’t get it to work on XP, which is still our primary OS for user machines.  Here is the script that I planned to copy out to the workstations, execute it remotely, and have it write the information back to the server.

‘ HardDriveSerialNumbers.vbs

‘

‘ Version 0.5 – Oct 2010

‘——————————————————–‘

Option Explicit

Dim objFSO, objFolder, objShell, objFile, objTextFile, objWMIService, objItem, oshell

Dim strDirectory, strFile, strText, strComputer, colItems, k, serial, strSerial, strSpace, strLine, host

strComputer = “.”

strDirectory = “\\127.0.0.1\c$\users\administrator\desktop\testvbs”

strFile = “\HDSerialNumbers.txt”

strSpace = “”

strLine = “=======================================================”

‘ Places Hostname into a variable

Set oShell = CreateObject( “WScript.Shell” )

host=oShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings(“%ComputerName%” )

‘ Create the File System Object

Set objFSO = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject” )

‘ Check that the strDirectory folder exists

If objFSO.FolderExists(strDirectory) Then

Set objFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(strDirectory)

Else

Set objFolder = objFSO.CreateFolder(strDirectory)

End If

If objFSO.FileExists(strDirectory & strFile) Then

Set objFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(strDirectory)

Else

Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile(strDirectory & strFile)

End If

set objFolder = nothing

set objFile = nothing

‘ OpenTextFile Method needs a Const value

‘ ForAppending = 8 ForReading = 1, ForWriting = 2

Const ForAppending = 8

‘ Sets text file to open and modify

Set objTextFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile _

(strDirectory & strFile, ForAppending, True)

objTextFile.WriteLine(strSpace)

objTextFile.WriteLine(host)

‘ WMI for drive serial numbers will return all drives to include CD drive currently errors on cd drive

On Error Resume Next

Set objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:” & “{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\” & strComputer & “\root\cimv2” )

Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery(“SELECT * FROM Win32_PhysicalMedia” )

k = 0

serial = “”

For Each objItem in colItems

objTextFile.WriteLine(objItem.SerialNumber)

next

‘ Writes strText every time you run this VBScript

objTextFile.WriteLine(strLine)

objTextFile.Close

If err.number = vbEmpty then

Set objShell = CreateObject(“WScript.Shell” )

objShell.run (“Explorer” & ” ” & strDirectory & “\”  )

Else WScript.echo “VBScript Error: ” & err.number

End If

WScript.Quit

‘ End of VBScript to create file on DC with Workstation Hard Drive Serial Numbers

Now I am not the best when it comes to vbscript so my structure may be bad but I only care if it works and the making it pretty later.  But once again I could only get this to work in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.  For the other operating systems I kept looking and found a little freeware application that will retrieve the hard drive information.  It writes more than what I need but it gets the job done.  The executable is called diskid32.exe, I found it at http://www.winsim.com/diskid32/diskid32.html.  It also has a DLL file that is suppose to make the executable work with Windows 2000 and earlier.

Anyhow I work this into a batch file that asks you for the IP of the machine you want to write the information to, then copies the executable and a batch file to each machine, and executes to retrieve the info and write it back to the IP that was inputted at the beginning.  The batch file also uses psexec.exe from  Sysinternals to login to the remote machines to execute the files copied to each machine.  We also use a text file that has the names of all of the machines on the network that we call a nodelist.txt.  So here is what the batch file looks like.

REM     ———————————–

Rem Written by ogwatermelon 8Oct10

REM     ———————————–

@echo off

cls

echo =========================================================

echo                                                                       HDInfo

echo =========================================================

echo.

echo.

echo.

echo.

echo Enter the IP Address for the server to write info to.

echo.

echo.

echo.

echo.

echo.

set /p _host=Enter IP address:

echo COPYING FILES

for /f %%D IN (nodelist.txt) DO echo %%D & copy diskid32.exe \\%%D\c$\windows

echo.

ECHO EXECUTING DATA COLLECTION

for /f %%C IN (nodelist.txt) DO echo ==================================================================== >> \\%_host%\c$\hdserials.txt & echo %%C—–%%C—–%%C—–%%C >> \\%_host%\c$\hdserials.txt & echo ===================================================================== >> \\%_host%\c$\hdserials.txt & psexec.exe \\%%C C:\windows\diskid32.exe >> \\%_host%\c$\hdserials.txt

echo finished

pause

The lines of equal signs is to make a recognizable line to look for the hostname and to divide the information in the file that it writes.  The diskid32 executable writes the drive serials, product ids, version numbers, and even the MAC address of the computer.  So the file it writes back it pretty large, but the serials are easy to find.  This will run on XP, Svr 2003, Vista, 7, and Svr 2008.  One of the other admins and I are working on a program to strip out the information that we need from the file and create a report that will be presentable.  It works, gets the correct information, and is free.  So if you need hard drive serial numbers and don’t have other software that can retrieve it for you, feel free to use and modify these scripts to fit your need.  I hope this can help someone.