On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Scott Silva <ssilva at sgvwater.com> wrote: <snip> >>> MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com> took out a #2 pencil and scribbled: >>>> Over the weekend, I had to make a technical support call on one >>>> of my DVD burners, and at one point the recorded message >>>> mentioned I should have my serial number handy. I thought there >>>> was a way to read that from at least one piece of software on the >>>> system, but I couldn't remember one and man -k on a number of >>>> subjects was unrevealing. >>>> >>>> Can someone enlighten me (us)? <snip> >> Mark: Try that! On my Desktop, it gives me the SN for the HD (hda), >> but the space for >> SN is blank, for hdc (DVD reader) and hdd (CD-RW). . If you are lucky, >> on your box, it will give you the SN for the DVD >> burner. Lanny > > I don't think most optical drive manufacturers embed serial numbers in their > drives. Hard drives are different, as their testing process lets them change > something like a serial number, but an optical drive would require a custom > firmware to be created and then loaded to the drive. That would slow the > process. That probably explains why when I tried it, there were no serial numbers for my opticlal drives. I always see an SN for a HD, when running diagnostics on them. Sounds like Mark is going to need to pull the bad DVD burner anyway, so when he does, he can read the SN on the label and get an RMA for it.