determining Hard disk serial number

The volume serial number is the only "serial" number you can retrieve from a hard disk. As you may have already found out, GetVolumeInformation() is used to retrieve that information.

I know of now stardard way to retieve any other "serial" information from or about a hard disk.

You might try contacting the HDD manufacturer and see if they can tell you if it's possible to do this.

I have never seen a windows program find out a Hard drive serial number, but you could try the following.
#1) Create a batch file that contains the following: dir c:\*.*>c:\serial.no
#2) now in your programming language, make it run the batch file minimized and then play with "c:\serial.no". that contains the serial number of the hard drive.

you have to work with hardware at low level. I've read information from internal HDD controller. And that is sad - not all HDDs has S/N inside, sometimes they are same. you need to check DDK for Win9x/NT. Basically you'll need to write .vxd access driver and will communicate with it from your program. I can sent an example.

As another easier solution - try to read BIOS information - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\Root\*PNP0C01\0000 - here is manufacturer, bus type, CPU and other info about PC.

Sincerely, Sergey
Brainbench MVP for Win98 Administration

open up the case, pull out the HD, and get
the serial #

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