a unique hardware serail number from VB

[shirish_1968]

Through a Visual Basic program can i find out a serail number of the hardware it is being installed in, say the Harddisk Serial number, or motherboard serial number which is unique.

If possible then how.

[amitabh]

look at the link http://www.allapi.net/api/GetVolumeInformation.php

[ai.unit]

nope! unfortunately that won't help much , coz a harddisk serial can be changed and there are utiliyies for this (also it gets changed when the drive is formatted), but the serial number that is called a factory number is what is needed, and getting it requires direct memory access, and this is something that windows will never allow you to do in VB without the aid of some external vxd or something...
the API cant help with this neither..

long time ago i had a try with this, and i went to www.tetradyne.com to try their driverX that enables you to read/write directly to memory locations under windows. however, it didnt work with all harddisks. Quantum, seagate and others worked fine, but i saw other types that didnt return a factory number (or ID)..

anyway, if you are interested, you can download a trial of driverX, and contact me to get you the code i used...