Recently I needed to reinstall Windows on a system and, unfortunately, I had lost the serial number. Using two simple Linux bash commands, I managed to find the serial number embedded into the computer’s BIOS. This is easy to accomplish on any computer and/or laptop that comes with Windows OS preinstalled.

Below I have censored the serial number (d’ohhhh!) and replaced it with XXXX.

# ls /sys/firmware/acpi/tables
APIC BATB DBG2 DMAR dynamic FACP FPDT MCFG SLIC SSDT10 SSDT2 SSDT4 SSDT6 SSDT8 TPM2 UEFI2
ASF! BOOT DBGP DSDT ECDT FACS HPET MSDM SSDT1 SSDT11 SSDT3 SSDT5 SSDT7 SSDT9 UEFI1 WSMT

You need xxd command for the next step.

xxd – make a hexdump or do the reverse.

# sudo xxd /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
0000000: 4d53 444d 5500 0000 03cd 4c45 4e4f 564f MSDMU.....LENOVO
0000010: 5450 2d4e 3151 2020 2014 0000 5054 4543 TP-N1Q ...PTEC
0000020: 0200 0000 0100 0000 0000 0000 0100 0000 ................
0000030: 0000 0000 xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx ........XXXXX-XX
0000040: xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx XXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-
0000050: xxxx xxxx xx XXXXX

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