Find serial numbers on slaved HDDs with Powershell

For starters, a little background. I am in the IT dept at my company, and we have a large number of HDD's that we need to archive. I have a powershell script that will grab hostname and username info from the drives, but I would like to grab the serial numbers as well if I can.

Here's what I currently have that will grab the serial number info:

$Disks = Get-WMIObject -class win32_PhysicalMedia
foreach($Disk in $Disks) {Write-Host $Disk.SerialNumber}

Ok, here's my question:
This portion of the script works just fine, but it seems that the serial number field that stores this information is blank unless the PC was booted up with the HDD connected internally. I have close to 200-300 HDD's that I need to go through and we usually get a couple more every day, so it's not very feasible to reboot the computer for each drive (as opposed to using a USB HDD dock). Does anyone know if it's possible to have the computer re-scan the disks, or some other action that will cause this serial number field to populate, or will it only be populated when the drive is installed internally from boot-up?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Thanks for the tip, I'll keep that in mind. Ultimately, I would like to see if I can make it work within powershell though, as my powershell script gathers all the info, and then automatically prints it, so ultimately all I will need to do for each drive is connect it, and push F5.

I don't know powershell either but here's another tool that might help. (It can also be run from command line and output to tab delimited file so you can extract the data you seek)

Look at USBDeview freeware from Nirsoft to see serial numbers of USB connected disks. (Note the disks don't even need be still connected. Note the column header Connected tells you if the device is still connected or not)

Click on column header Device Type to sort and then the scroll down to look at the USB Mass Storage (This device type also includes CD/DVD drives so you may still need to further filter the results if you only want disk)

btw... What is the host name and user name of a hard drive???

ComputerGeek said:

I don't know powershell either but here's another tool that might help. (It can also be run from command line and output to tab delimited file so you can extract the data you seek)

Look at USBDeview freeware from Nirsoft to see serial numbers of USB connected disks. (Note the disks don't even need be still connected. Note the column header Connected tells you if the device is still connected or not)

Click on column header Device Type to sort and then the scroll down to look at the USB Mass Storage (This device type also includes CD/DVD drives so you may still need to further filter the results if you only want disk)

btw... What is the host name and user name of a hard drive???

Thanks ComputerGeek, good info. I might look into USBDeview for it's command line options if I can't get it to work within powershell.

I'm basically just gathering what the hostname was for any drives with a windows OS on them, as well as the users listed in C:\Users (or Docs and settings for XP drives). There will be some drives that don't have a windows OS on them, so those won't follow my normal process.