Extracting mfr info from BIOS?

[jeannie94]

Dell servers, desktops and laptops all have a unique hardware ID
stored in BIOS (they call it a "Service Tag"), is anyone we aware of any
utilities that can be run from a DOS shell that can extract this info? If
the box has not been re-installed since coming from Dell the info is stored
in c:\dell\sysinfo.dat - but if the user deletes this file, the directory,
or if the box is re-installed fresh or from a generic disk image- that information goes away.

Thanks in advance.

[Axel]

Any chance that this was a recent event - the disk image, I mean -

I'm thinking perhaps you can bring back the file with norton undelete or a similar product if the physical disk area the file was stored on hasn't been written over, and hasn't been low level formatted.

Not sure how to pull that EEPROM tag, but I'll bet there's a utility afailable to dump the contents of almost any EEPROM.

Who made the BIOS - you might check their site for such a utility, as that is something they'd have to have on hand to troubleshoot issues.

Thing is, that'd be a major security violation to let such a thing out as you could get a BIOS password that way.

[jeannie94]

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question, I appreciate the info.

I'm trying to use some type of dat file or text file that I can import into Tivoli Inventory scan for asset management, to tie a user to an identifier automatically.

The techs are supposed to record information manually, and it becomes a bit much at times, particularly when they have a ton of open tickets

[Mntsnow]

You might also be able to gleen the info you want by using one of 2 different little dos programs called CTBIOS and CTPCI and they will give you quite a bit of useful info. you can download them from my website (http://www.mntsnow.com/downloads/ctbios.zip)

Mntsnow