It seems that we could not read the serial number of external hard disk either in powershell. The following command in the powershell

Get-WMIObject win32_physicalmedia | Format-List Tag,SerialNumber.



I get some junk like thing in serialnumber output ....

I'm not sure, sorry. It seems to work fine with external HDDs at my PC at home.

Looks like there's an issue in Windows 7 with certain characters in hdd serial numbers. A hotfix was available but since Windows 7 is no longer supported by Microsoft, I don't think it is obtainable now.



https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2664203/invalid-xml-content-error-message-when-you-run-a-wmic-command-in-windo

Now, I tried with 2 hdd (Toshiba and WD) with wmic command

Toshiba - returns junk in Win 7, returns serial number in Win 10. This is the one that I was trying from the beginning.

WD - works fine in both Win 7 and Win 10.



I tried copying wmic.exe file from Win 10 machine to Win 7 machine, command itself doesn't work in Win 7. (Didn't expect it to work either, just tried).

Few HDD may not return correct serial number in Win 7, and no solution available as of now.

Good tips John ... Thanks!

Thanks Chris and John Fauss,

Sure, I want only the Manufacturer assigned serial number and NOT the volume serial number assigned by OS.



While googling, I read about a tool (paid one) that does this work, to read manufacturer serial number on every possible environment. I forgot where I saw this tool, and couldn't get back that website.

Hi John;

This external function (with a few tweaks) is now working great for me in my framework ....

FUNCTION Long GetVolumeInformation ( string lpRootPathName, REF string lpVolumeNameBuffer, ulong nVolumeNameSize, REF ulong lpVolumeSerialNumber, REF ulong lpMaximumComponentLength, REF ulong lpFileSystemFlags, REF string lpFileSystemNameBuffer, ulong nFileSystemNameSize) LIBRARY "Kernel32.dll" ALIAS FOR "GetVolumeInformationW"

FYI: I also noticed that is supports UNC drive mappings as well. :-)

Regards ... Chris