How to get serial number from Mac hard disks?

Question

Is there an easy way to get the serial number of all the hard disks in a Mac using an API?

Basically, I'm looking for a unique identifier for the hard disk with which I can figure out whether the hard disk has been used (or referred to) by my application or not.

Please let me know if there is any other solution.

Note: I need this solution for 10.4 and above.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if "AppleUSBEHCI" is the proper thing to look for but you can retrieve this sort of data using the IOKit framework:

#include <IOKit/IOKitLib.h>
#include <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>

kern_return_t   kr;
io_iterator_t   io_objects;
io_service_t    io_service;

kr = IOServiceGetMatchingServices(kIOMasterPortDefault,
            IOServiceNameMatching("AppleUSBEHCI"), &io_objects);

if(kr != KERN_SUCCESS)
    exit(1);

while((io_service= IOIteratorNext(io_objects)))
{
    kr = IORegistryEntryCreateCFProperties(io_service, &service_properties, kCFAllocatorDefault, kNilOptions);
    if(kr == KERN_SUCCESS)
    {
        NSDictionary * m = (NSDictionary *)service_properties;
        NSLog(@"%@", m);
        CFRelease(service_properties);
    }

    io_iterator_t   iter;
    //handle kr error
    kr = IORegistryEntryGetChildIterator(io_service, kIOServicePlane, &iter);

    io_registry_entry_t     child;
    while( (child = IOIteratorNext( iter )))
    {
        kr = IORegistryEntryCreateCFProperties(child, &child_props,  kCFAllocatorDefault, kNilOptions );
        NSLog(@"Child props: %@", child_props);
        //release child_props
    }

    IOObjectRelease(io_service);
}

IOObjectRelease(io_objects);