From the still present C\ drive, I have obtained the “Almost S/N” of a missing Maxtor Internal HD from the registry of the Windows XP operating system.
In other words I converted the registry Hex to the ASCII, and then (by experimentation with other Maxtor HDs,) have come up with a simple re-arrangement of the registry derived ASCII (“Almost S/N”) that matches the printed label on a test HD.
The problem is that while experimenting I found two different algorythms for Maxtor internal HDs.
The first is
21| 43| 65|87
The second is
14| 36| 58| 97
Accordingly if the “Almost S/N” (Derived from the registry) was ABCDEFGHI,
The S/N printed on the label might be either
BADCFEHG
Or
ADCFEHIG
Or even a 3rd or 4th arrangement if that is what Maxtor does.
It is easy enough to figure out which rule applies if I have the HD in front of me. But, in the situation at hand I don’t have the HD in hand and want to be able to say with some degree of certainty what I believe the S/N of the missing HD to be.
In order to do that, I believe that I need some sort of authoritative publication from Maxtor, (Now Seagate) specifying the algorithm they use for different series of drives. There must be some sort of publication(s) that Maxtor and the other drive manufacturers refer to. Does anyone have it? I have not been able to find it at the Maxtor web sites. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Al,
Can you reveal which Registry key/value you extracted the "almost S/N" from?
Thanks,
H
Those characters are more likely to be the hard drive's firmware revision (typically YAR41BWO or similar) rather than the serial number.
Duncan
Duncan,
As the OP has never returned to tell us which key he's referring to, it may be the volume SN that he is illustrating.