Saturday, February 13, 2016

PowerShell one liner to get USB Flash Drive Serial Number

First a confession, I bought the “Learn Windows PowerShell 3 in a Month of Lunches” book quite a while ago but still haven’t had the discipline to work my way through it.

Couple that with tons of PowerShell learning resources documented across the GSD blog and I am woefully behind the game.

However, I can read music so I guess that means I can puzzle out code with patience and Google searching.

One of my duties is to keep inventory of USB device issuances to the team. I record the serial numbers of the devices in a spreadsheet.

While some external USB HDD’s have the device serial number listed on the external case, USB flash drives aren’t so good wtih that practice.

There are some USB imaging tools such as the USB Image Tool or utilities such as USBDeview or Kanguru’s free Serial Number Display Tool that I could use to get that information directly.

However, I really like to stick with “in-box” tools and techniques so while that would be the “easy” way I’ve been collecting the information the “long-way-round” by the following process:

  1. Insert USB flash drive into system.
  2. Open Control Panel
  3. Open Device Manager
  4. Expand the “Universal Serial Bus controllers” item
  5. Look for the “USB Mass Storage Device” in the list (that’s my inserted flash drive)
  6. Right-click that item and select “Properties”
  7. Select the “Details” tab
  8. In the Properties list, pick “Device Instance Path”
  9. Read the serial number which is the trailing string after the last “\”

Eject and repeat.

What I wanted to do was just run a “WMIC” query directly from the command line to get that specific information via the Command Prompt.

But despite my best efforts (which isn’t saying much) I wasn’t able to locate the correct parameter.

Tonight I did find and tweak a similar command via PowerShell and it does the trick. So while it isn’t elegant, it does the job I need. Victory at last!

gwmi Win32_USBControllerDevice |%{[wmi]($_.Dependent)} | Where-Object {($_.Description -like '*mass*')} | Sort Description,DeviceID | ft Description,DeviceID –auto

(That’s one long string btw.)

So I can get a result like this:

Description             DeviceID
-----------             --------
USB Mass Storage Device USB\VID_0DD8&PID_3200\<serial number displayed here>

Your DeviceID details will vary depending on the make/model/etc. but the serial number is there easy to copy/paste.

Credits:

wmi - Getting a USB Device Instance Path in Powershell - Stack Overflow. This post got me finally on the right track but still didn’t work for me.

Displaying USB Devices using WMI - Windows PowerShell Blog.  Jeffrey Snover’s post did get me the output I was looking for, but I then needed to clean it up just a bit as I only wanted the “USB Mass Storage Device” information.

Filtering PowerShell Objects - PowerShell content from Windows IT Pro. This was the final bit in giving examples how I could filter for just the one line I needed.

If anyone can “refine” the code or filter it more to just pass on the Serial Number string itself, I would be grateful for any recommendations.

Using PowerShell’s gwmi or the Command WMIC call are powerful ways to get system information.

Here are some additional examples that I’ve collected trying to puzzle out my own particular USB Mass Storage device query technique that could be helpful to sysadmins:

Cheers!

--Claus Valca.

Bonus USB utility finds:

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