How to get hard drive serial number from command line?

Question

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

Answer 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.

Answer 2

• 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:

• The file was stored in the root of C:

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

Answer 3

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
)