BBC BASIC Programmers' Reference

by Richard Russell, October 2015

Disk drives (including internal and external hard drives, USB flash drives etc.) have two kinds of serial number. One is the volume serial number which is created when the drive is formatted, and can later be changed, and the other is the hardware serial number which is assigned by the manufacturer and cannot be changed (at least, not in a straightforward way). The volume serial number is easily discovered (e.g. using the GetVolumeInformation API function) but finding the hardware serial number is more tricky.

The program below lists the hardware serial numbers of each of the mounted drives in the system:

        INSTALL @lib$+"COMLIB"
        PROC_cominitlcid(1033)
 
        ON ERROR PROCcleanup : SYS "MessageBox", @hwnd%, REPORT$, 0, 0 : END
 
        objSWbemLocator% = FN_createobject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")
 
        objWMIService% = FN_getobject(objSWbemLocator%, \
        \                            "ConnectServer(""."", ""root\CIMV2"")")
 
        objSWbemObjectSet% = FN_getobject(objWMIService%, \
        \                "execQuery(""select * from win32_physicalMedia"")")
 
        nObjs% = FN_getvalueint(objSWbemObjectSet%, "Count")
        IF nObjs%=0 ERROR 100, "No disk drives present"
 
        SYS !(!objSWbemObjectSet%+28), objSWbemObjectSet%, ^pEnum%
        IF pEnum%=0 ERROR 100, "SWbemObjectSet::NewEnum failed"
 
        DIM Variant{(nObjs%) type%, pad%, ldata%, hdata%}
 
        SYS !(!pEnum%+20), pEnum% : REM IEnumVARIANT::Reset
        FOR i% = 1 TO nObjs%
          SYS !(!pEnum%+12), pEnum%, 1, Variant{(i%)}, ^celtFetched%
          IF celtFetched%<>1 ERROR 100, "IEnumVARIANT::Next failed"
        NEXT i%
        SYS !(!pEnum%+8), pEnum% : REM IEnumVARIANT::Release
 
        FOR i% = 1 TO nObjs%
          PRINT "Drive ";i%;" serial number is: ";
          dummy% = FN_getvariant(Variant{(i%)}.ldata%, "SerialNumber", _ret{})
          IF _ret.vartype% = 8 THEN
            PRINT _ret.data$
          ELSE
            PRINT "Not available"
          ENDIF
        NEXT i%
 
        PROCcleanup
        END
 
        DEF PROCcleanup
        PROC_releaseobject(objSWbemLocator%)
        PROC_comexit
        ENDPROC