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motherboard serial number not scanned

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Mike Ray

We are migrating from lansweeper and I must say I like PDQ Inventory/Deploy substantially more than lansweeper.

One thing from lansweeper, the serial number of the motherboard was scanned/stored. 

In Inventory, there is a field for motherboard serial number I believe (System -> Serial Number). This is not the product key nor the OS serial number (nor should it be). However, only 1 of several hundred machines actually has this information filled out.

I ran scans with the computer scanner against individual boxes, making sure they said they completed successfully, but they still do not show this information. 

Any idea what might be the problem?

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Comments

8 comments
Date Votes
  • Avatar
    K H

    I am in a similar situation. I noticed that not all serial numbers are recognized in my installation of PDQ inventory (free version, so far). It looks like mainly mainboards produced by INTEL are affected but not in a consistant way, a few numbers for INTEL boards _are_ shown by PDQ inventory.Some of the unrecognized serial numbers are displayed as a blank value but most others show as a series of dots ..........

    Strangely enough, two machines which were purchased at the same time and _should_ be set up identical show differing results, for the first one the serial number is displayed but not for the second one.

    Is there a way to enable some verbose logging during the scanning process?

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  • Avatar
    Andrew Martin

    Is there any update on the status of support for this feature? It would be very useful!

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    Jason Hanks

    Hi,

    Are the serial boards that are not showing up in Inventory from machines that were custom built?  Part of the reason this might be happening is that there are a few different places and ways that the information can be stored and queried but we pull from the bios using the following commands:

    wmic bios get serialnumber
    wmic computersystem get model

    If the information for your motherboard isn't entered into the BIOS , that would explain why you're seeing that in the console.  While there are other places that this information can be grabbed with WMI it's not always reliable information and we don't have a way to tell Inventory which field to differentiate for the correct information.

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    K H

    Hi again,

    I have had only one opportunity to take one of the machines down so far, to take a look at the UEFI shell but that one had the serial number entered in the wrong place. As all of the affected machines with Intel boards came from a local reseller, I assume they put the information in the wrong place for some and in the right place for other machines, hence the inconsistency

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    Andrew Martin

    Jason,

    Thanks for the help. I ran "wmic cpu get name" on several of the computers whose information is not populated in PDQ Inventory (I am in particular interested in the CPU model) and in all cases that wmic command returned the desired information (name and model of the CPU). Since WMI is able to see this information, could  there be another reason it is not making it into PDQ Inventory?

     

    Thanks,

     

    Andrew

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  • Avatar
    Jason Hanks

    Hi Andrew,

    Even though the information you're looking for is available with other WMI scans, those aren't the ones that we use so the information isn't gathered and shown in Inventory.

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  • Avatar
    Andrew Martin

    Hi Jason,

     

    Thanks for the clarification. Is it possible to add another column of data to Inventory that would use the cpu WMI scan (or customize the WMI scan that my instance uses), so that we can get this information into Inventory? Right now I'm not able to distinguish between the different generations of systems because Inventory doesn't contain information about the CPU model. Adding this would make Inventory significantly more useful to me.

     

    Thanks,

     

    Andrew

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  • Avatar
    Jason Hanks

    Hi Andrew,

    At this time the developers are still discussing custom WMI scanning in the product, but not sure what has been discussed or any kind of time frame.  I will say that most likely the information will be available like a custom file scan but not sure on the information being available in it's own column view.

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