Windows Commands Line

Get serial number for RAM, motherboard, hard disk

This post explains how to find serial number for various hardware devices – RAM, Hard disk, Motherboard on a computer. We can use WMIC command to find this information.  These commands can be executed from Windows command prompt.

Get serial number of RAM chips.

wmic memorychip get serialnumber

This command lists serial number for each RAM module installed on the computer. Example below.

c:\>wmic memorychip get serialnumber

SerialNumber

91AB9A10

9EBD9A10

Get serial number for hard disks

wmic diskdrive get serialnumber

Example:

c:\>wmic diskdrive get serialnumber

SerialNumber

FR3AG13032430BC13S

Get serial number for mother boards

wmic baseboard get serialnumber

 

Get Serial number for cdrom drive

wmic cdrom where drive='d:' get SerialNumber

Replace ‘d:’ with the drive letter for the cdrom on your computer. You get error ‘No Instance(s) available’ if you don’t have CDROM drive on your computer.

c:\>wmic cdrom  get SerialNumber

No Instance(s) Available.

MAC address command

Get SID of a local user

wmic useraccount where name='username' get sid

For example, to get the SID for a local user with the login name  ‘John’, the command would be as below:

wmic useraccount where name='John' get sid

SID for current logged in domain user

Run the command ‘whoami /user’ from command line to get the SID for the logged in user.
Example:

c:\>whoami /user

USER INFORMATION

----------------

User Name      SID

============== ==============================================

mydomain\wincmd S-1-5-21-7375663-6890924511-1272660413-2944159

c:\>

Get SID for the local administrator of the computer

wmic useraccount where (name='administrator' and domain='%computername%') get name,sid

Get SID for the domain administrator

wmic useraccount where (name='administrator' and domain='%userdomain%') get name,sid

Find username from a SID
Now this is tip is to find the user account when you have a SID. One of the readers of this post had this usecase and he figured out the command himself with the help of the commands given above. Adding the same here.

wmic useraccount where sid='S-1-3-12-1234525106-3567804255-30012867-1437' get name

Find any installed windows updates

command 1.      [wmic qfe list]

command 2. [systeminfo | find ": KB"]

Windows native commands

At	Schedule tasks
Attrib	Set file attributes
Bootcfg	Enable kernel debugging
copy	Copy files
Compact	Compress or decompress files and directories
Echo	Echo the command/contents of a file
Date	Set system date and time
Del	Delete files
Dir	List files and directories
Eventquery.vbs	View events
find	Search files for a given string
findstr	Search files for a given string; Has advanced options than find command.
for	Windows batch command for looping
getmac	Find mac address of the system
hostname	Get system name
logoff	Logoff user session
Mkdir	Create directories
More	More command. Similar to Linux more command
Net user	Manage user accounts
Net use	Create/List/Delete network drives
Net localgroup	Manage local computer’s user groups
Net share	Create / List/ Delete shares on the local computer
Reg	Edit/create/delete registry keys
Rename	Rename files
Rename	Rename directories
Rmdir	Delete directories
Robocopy	Copy large number of files/folders
Runas	Run an application as a different user in the same session
Schtasks	Schedule tasks
Shutdown	Shutdown computer
Shutdown	Shutdown remote computer
Sort:	Command for sorting text files
Systeminfo	Get computer information
Tasklist	List processes
Taskkill	Kill processes
Type	Cat command for Windows. Prints the contents of file on command window
Xcopy	Copy files and directories