wmic diskdrive get serialnumber -> invalid xml output

wmi serial-number wmic
user1210404 picture user1210404 · Feb 15, 2012 · Viewed 17.9k times · Source

I want to read the name and the serial number of my hard drives.

I stumbled upon wmic but I'm having troubles. I guess these two commands should do the trick, but I only get the message:

Invalid Xml-Content. //(Translated)

wmic path win32_physicalmedia get serialnumber

or

wmic DISKDRIVE GET SerialNumber

I tried the following as well:

wmic DISKDRIVE GET SerialNumber /FORMAT:list
wmic DISKDRIVE GET SerialNumber /FORMAT:xml.xsl
wmic DISKDRIVE GET SerialNumber > c:\test.txt

Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

Solution:

Thanks JPBlanc, via the /? command I've found out that SerialNumber doesn't even exist. I now use

WMIC /output:"c:\hdds.txt" DISKDRIVE GET PNPDeviceID,Name /Format:CSV

which gives the correct result.

Answer

Matthias Braun picture Matthias Braun · May 26, 2014

I was getting this error on Windows 7 x86 Pro (where querying the serial number should be possible) when an external drive was connected.

This is how I fixed it:

  1. Get the ID of each drive: wmic diskdrive get deviceid /format:list

  2. Parse the output and get the first ID. In my case this was \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0

  3. Escape the backslashes so that the ID is \\\\.\\PHYSICALDRIVE0

  4. Get the serial number of the drive using its escaped ID:

    wmic diskdrive where deviceid='\\\\.\\PHYSICALDRIVE0' get serialnumber /format:list

  5. Repeat steps 2 - 4 until you have the serial numbers of all drives

Edit: The above doesn't work on my copy of Windows XP x86 Pro.

This does:

wmic path win32_physicalmedia where tag='\\\\.\\PHYSICALDRIVE0' get serialnumber /format:list

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