No more disk drive serial number in disk utility

MrH ... I am seeking something that on the old disk utility used to

be called the USB serial number. That may be a kind of MAC

address on the USB bus, I am not sure, but it must be unique.

It must not be, at least for my purposes something that is system

dependent, ie on partitioning or configuration schemes.

Here is an example that I snarfed off Google searching for disk

utility images ...

Please note the last field on the lower left near the question mark called

USB serial number. This is a field that is no longer listed in the "info"

screen of disk utility that I can find now. That is, if I take a drive that

has a USB Serial Number on it on my OS X Yosemite system and attach

it to a system with the new version of Disk Utility, that field is moved, gone

or missing? But if I attach it to my MacBookPro which has the older

OS and version of Disk Utility, that number remains constant.

Thanks for the idea of using diskutil, but so far I cannot see this number

in any of its output screens on either system.

Here is another image of disk utility where a disk is connected by

Firewire, and that field is labelled as "connection id"

Seemingly now the only way I can access that number if to attach the

drive via USB to a system running the old disk utility and pull it off the

partition screen.

Hi Kappy,

Thanks, that does bring up a screen with some disk information,

but the number I am looking for is not there.

I think I might have misspoke as I don't think I meant the serial

number, but that is what I thought of it as. I think this is a number

if I recall that was labelled the universal number, meaning that

it was supposed to be unique across all disks in the known

universe and beyond! ;-)

I had previously only ever seen this on multiple disk volumes on

the chassis, but at some point they began labeling single hard

drives this way too and they were queriable from software. I'm

thinking the purpose was to have ID numbers on disks and in the

configuration sectors that allowed software to ID a disk or disk

set or storage fabric or some such???

I checked this one another machine and under the OLD Disk

Utility when I click on the drive I see USB Serial number, so that

seems to be the number I am looking for.

I cannot get the info field by right-clicking, but I can bring ip up

by clicking on the info button at the header of the Disk Utility

window. That sub-window has no such identifier in it, though

if I attach the same disk to my old laptop it shows up just fine.

I am baffled ... apparently they just removed this as far as I can

see?

That UUID is not what I am looking for because it will change

depending on what interface the disk is attached to.

On my disk utility version 15.0 under El Capitan 10.11.6 there

is no capability to right-click the device, but there is a button

at the top of the window header labelled info, for whatever

disk is highlighted on the left. There is no connection or

USB Serial Number.

Thanks.

>> MrHoffman: Kappy has given you some good answers.

Not really, and who asked the question here ... I'll be the judge of that.

One wonders why you feel the need to brown nose on a forum like this.

Sticking to the facts would really be great. If Apple communitied had as

many answers as they do busybodies this place would be more useful.

system_profiler ... thanks, that is something I did not know about that may be useful.

I never really understood why some people have to comment on how

others decide to set up their systems. It's not really helpful or friendly,

just condescending and irritating, and double to get it from someone

trying to use my question to flatter another contributor ... ugh, the problem

with Apple is the politics all around. Just stick to the facts.

Mr.H,

The system_profiler does return this information in some varied forms.

I'll have to work on understanding it and find out where it might come from.

Here is the relevant output on 1 Western Digital 5TB My Book USB drive:

| | | | | "uid" = "USB:105812303448384A4836"

| | | | | "USB Serial Number" = "5758313144423448384A4836"

Serial Number: 5758313144423448384A4836

It's interesting how it is only the last 12 digits are the same

3448384A4836

between the UID and the serial number ... but I just want the last 4.

So much data is returned here it is hard to work with, but it is there.

Now I have to see what the El Capitan system does.

The purpose of all this is to tie together hardware and software by this number.

If I label my disks with these numbers I can get something like this ...

grep "4138" system_profiler.out.txt

| | | | | "uid" = "USB:105812303539564C4138"

| | | | | "USB Serial Number" = "5758313144323539564C4138"

Public-5TB_4138:

Mount Point: /Volumes/Public-5TB_4138

Serial Number: 5758313144323539564C4138

Public-5TB_4138:

Mount Point: /Volumes/Public-5TB_4138

This ties together hardware and software and with a label on the drive the physical drive as well.

Reduce confusion, reduce mistakes. I have many external USB drives to manage on these systems.

Regards