Determine hard drive serial number in mono?

Question

I am developing a library in C# that generates a unique hardware ID using these 3 variables

Machine name
MAC address
Hard drive serial number

I am able to get the machine name and MAC address in both .NET and Mono but I can only get the hard drive serial number in .NET. Does anyone know if there is any possible way to get the hard drive serial number in mono or should I just use another variable (ie: CPU name, Motherboard ID, etc)?

Note that both the machine name and MAC address can manually be set, so they are not really unique. — Peter M, Feb 27 '12 at 00:51
And a MAC address can be spoofed: http://osxdaily.com/2008/01/17/how-to-spoof-your-mac-address-in-mac-os-x/ You can not assume it is unique to a specific Ethernet interface on a specific computer. — Peter M, Feb 27 '12 at 12:40

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 17 '17 at 12:21

You can get it also with user permission with ioreg

from a shell:

ioreg -p IOService -n AppleAHCIDiskDriver -r|grep \"Serial Number\"|awk '{print $NF;}'

programmatically:

    uint GetVolumeSerial(string rootPathName)
    {
        uint volumeSerialNumber = 0;
        ProcessStartInfo psi = new ProcessStartInfo();
        psi.FileName = "/usr/sbin/ioreg";
        psi.UseShellExecute = false;
        psi.Arguments = "-p IOService -n AppleAHCIDiskDriver -r -d 1";
        psi.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
        Process p = Process.Start(psi);
        string output;
        do
        {
            output = p.StandardOutput.ReadLine();
            int idx = output.IndexOf("Serial Number");
            if (idx != -1)
            {
                int last = output.LastIndexOf('"');
                int first = output.LastIndexOf('"', last - 1);
                string tmp = output.Substring(first + 1, last - first - 1);
                volumeSerialNumber = UInt32.Parse(tmp);
                break;
            }
        } while (!p.StandardOutput.EndOfStream);
        p.WaitForExit();
        p.Close();
        return volumeSerialNumber;
    }

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

According to this documentation:

Mac OS X doesn't support getting hard disk serial number from user-level application

If the requirement to be root on mac is not a problem for you (or you skip the mac version), I have one brute way to solve the problem:

Using this article or this question you can determine:

Are you running Mono or .NET
Which platform are you on

If you know you are on the LINUX system, you can get hardrive serial through running such system command:

/sbin/udevadm info --query=property --name=sda

On mac you can use Disk Utility (as root) to get harddrive serial. On windows you can use the standard approach.

Thanks! I might have to revert to a different variable for the unique identifier cause of MAC OSX. — SameOldNick, Feb 27 '12 at 05:36

Determine hard drive serial number in mono?

2 Answers2