site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com -- Terry _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... On Dec 18, 2007, at 1:00 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote: My next idea was to use the drive's serial number via kIOPropertyProductSerialNumberKey, but while IOStorageDeviceCharacteristics.h says the key is mandatory... Only a subset of SCSI devices (USB, ATAPI, SAS, etc) I've worked with have "real" serial numbers. Some devices are specified by the OEM with a Vendor, err, Vital Private Data (VPD; page 80h) structure, and the serial number can be stored there. Some don't have the VPD. A few (rare) devices are specified with host-writable areas; that was an approach that one vendor used to identify its widgets in a SAN fabric when multiple paths are present. Some devices (eg: USB keyboards) seldom seem to have any sort of unique identity. Being that this is an optical drive, you can't use the expedient of writing something identifiable onto the media. Which begs the question that's been on my mind since this thread started: Since this is removable optical media, why are you trying to identify the drive, rather than the media inserted into the drive? This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com