Reading the BIOS...

Archytas

Hi all,

I know this will be easy for someone but I've come up blank. I have around my office about 100 dell machines that I need to get the service tags for... now... I could try to find all the machines on the floor (about 800 machines).... but all I have is machine names.

So I have the ability to remote to these machines. Can I find the service tag by accessing the BIOS from within Windows? Anyone know any apps for this purpose? Unfortunately the ASSET app that Dell have wont work on the machines... I think. I tried to run it as a local user but not admin. and it gave me an error.

So any suggestions? Any help would be much appreciated...

zerodown

Hi, You can get the service tags by either:

A: Looking on the back of your computer, CPU not the monitor. On the older models all black cases, you can also open the grey panel on the front of the CPU. You will find a small sticker on the CPU under this panel which has the serial number (Service Tag).

or

B: In some Dells mainly Optiplex you can go to bios and press F2 to get the serial number.


Alternatively on computers running XP Pro or 2000, you can right click on My Computer, then go to properties. In there you will see computer name tag, (The serial will also be here)

I hope this helps and if you need assistance when you have the codes just ask here. There is a Service Tag to Express Service Code conversion required in some cases.

Archytas

Anywho... I found a way to do it with a app called smbios2 from IBM which can read the bios and output the entire table. So I wrote a bat file that would take all of that info and just give me what I needed and output it to a DB of comp names and service tags...

So then all I had to do was remote to the machines and run the file from one of the servers and voila - service tag from BIOS. Its still a long way round beacuase I have to remote to all of the machines but no matter, its a solution.

Em... I'd like to say thanks for the advice zerodown... but... it seems like you didn't read my post at all. But thanks anyway...

RoyalMarine

if he would have read it, then he would have seen that you were looking for a program to run from a fixed location to find the seriel codes... rather than running around to 800 computer's trying to find 100 of them...

yeah smbios2 is what we use to use. its handy enough but very limited.

snappieT

Can you remote execute? You could write & distribute the batch file to output the data from that IBM program to \\yourserver\assets\%COMPNAME\ and then look them all up centrally.

Capt'n Midnight

Dell have an asset reading program which works from a boot disk, not sure if it would work in windows command prompt.

At the other extreme if you install the open manage software on the clients you could read with SNMP or use the IT assistant program, which needs MSDE (server or workstation) too - big and messy but also gives reports on temperature and other stuff - it's free though.

irlrobins

7 months too late guys... :rolleyes: