How to find the serial number of your Self-Managed Server’s hard drive
Finding your Self-Managed Server serial number
Should your server logs or event logs indicate that one or more of your Self-Managed Server’s hard drives have failed or are failing, our Support team will request that you provide us with the serial number of either the working hard drive or the failing hard drive. The reason for this is so that our Data Centre technicians accurately exchange the correct hard drive(s).
In the case where the hard drive has not completely failed, you may provide us with the serial number of the faulty hard drive. If the hard drive has completely failed and you are unable to provide the serial number of the failed hard drive, you should provide us with the working hard drive’s serial number.
Please note: If you are providing us with your working hard drive’s serial number, you need to indicate that you have provided us with the serial number of the working hard drive to ensure that the correct hard drive is replaced.
The server logs or event logs will indicate which hard drive has failed or is failing. The below steps will briefly explain how to find the serial number of your hard drives:
How to determine the serial number of a hard drive in Windows:
- Download the following Open Source program called DiskID32 here.
- Open Command Prompt and navigate to the folder where the program was saved.
- Execute the program by entering the following command:
diskid32.exe
- The program will display more information, including the serial number(s), for the hard drive(s) in your Self-Managed Server.
How to determine the serial number of a hard drive in Linux:
- Open terminal and enter the following command:
sudo hdparm -i /dev/sd*
- The above command will display more information, including the serial number(s), for the hard drive(s) in your Self-Managed Server. Kindly note: If you receive an error such as “sudo: hdparm: command not found” you will need to install hdparm by executing the command:
sudo apt-get install hdparm
More information about the above command:
Entering sudo before the command assigns you with administrator rights. With -i /dev/sd* you assign hdparm a parameter that will provide you with more information about all the hard drives in the Self-Managed Server. You may also specify a single hard drive, for example, the drive displaying in the logs as failed, as follows:
sudo hdparm -i /dev/sda
In the above scenario, the ‘sda’ was displayed as failing and we are attempting to find the information about the above hard drive.
Please note: The hard drive naming convention may differ depending on the interface:
SCSI or SATA device: /dev/sd[a-z] IDE or ATA device: /dev/hd[a-t]
