Hard drive serial number from Terminal

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Level 1

9 points

Hard drive serial number from Terminal

Hello!

The question - how, without opening iMac - using Terminal, can I find out, what Apple's serial number is on my Seagate hard drive?

I have a situation with iMacs in company I'm working. After multiple hard drive failures we have found out, that most of our iMacs had defective Seagate Hard Drives, which Apple provided replacement program. The program now is expired and it's impossible to find out, whether they had hard drives, that very easily may fail or not. I contacted Apple service and got comment, that problem was with hard drives, that had 13 numbers in serial number. Hard drives with 17 numbers were OK. The discussion is about Apple serial number for Seagate hard drive, not Seagate's (take a look on red square in image).

To my question, how can I find out, whether my hard drives have 13 or 17 symbols, I got answer, that we either have to open iMac and check it by ourselves (for ~30 iMacs it's not the greatest thing to hear) or that there is a special terminal command, which may return this number, but the guy didn't remember at the moment, which exactly.

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)

Posted on Nov 28, 2014 1:29 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

David Talaga

Level 1

4 points

Dec 4, 2015 10:21 AM in response to Drew Reece

A command that just dumps the HD information is:

system_profiler SPSerialATADataType

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Answer 2

Drew Reece

Level 6

10,660 points

Nov 28, 2014 3:50 PM in response to valdistt

System Profiler is the the command line tool for a lot of system info, however think it displays the same as the GUI (AFAIK).

man system_profiler will give you the manual…

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/ man8/system_profiler.8.html

system_profiler -detailLevel full

Should give you the full report as text (probably the same info as enabling the full report in the GUI), you can pipe that to a file for easier searching…

system_profiler -detailLevel full > ~/Desktop/Report.txt

I'm not sure that you can access that Apple specific number via the command line, I would hassle Apple some more - the serial and model number should be enough for them to tie into their databases and the tiny text above that info tells you to refer to the OEM (Apple).

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Answer 3

WZZZ

Level 6

13,220 points

Nov 28, 2014 6:47 AM in response to valdistt

Don't know about command to show this, but just open "About this Mac" from the Apple logo in the menubar>More Info>System Report>SATA/SATAExpress

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Answer 4

valdistt Author

Level 1

9 points

Nov 28, 2014 11:44 AM in response to WZZZ

No, this is wrong number - it's S/N from screenshot - the one on the top. But it's not the one on the bottom.

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Answer 5

WZZZ

Level 6

13,220 points

Nov 28, 2014 12:48 PM in response to valdistt

Not sure if this is what you are saying, but what I'm showing in my screenshot is the S/N for my WD drive, with the Model # shown above. Just go to the same location. What do you see there for your Seagate? For your photo of the Seagate label: the S/N is 6VP4YAFG for the model ST31000528AS. They are different drives. They won't have the same number of characters or look the same. My screenshot was only to show you where to look for this. It's only an example.

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Answer 6

valdistt Author

Level 1

9 points

Nov 28, 2014 1:27 PM in response to WZZZ

I get your point, but the problem is different. Each original hard drive in iMacs have 2 serial numbers - the one, that can be seen, is Seagate or in your case - WD number. The second number is assigned by Apple for the same hard drive - and this is the number, that I have to find out, the number, written under Apple logo and barcode.

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Answer 7

Dec 4, 2015 11:44 AM in response to valdistt

The whole issue is compounded by the fact that these drives are specially made

for Apple with a special internal temperature sensor arrangement and not

just common off the shelf drives (as the really should be!).

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