title: Getting BIOS Serial Number without WMI
body: <p>I'm attempting to get the serial number of the BIOS for a WinXP Embedded 32-bit system from a Win32 user mode application (MFC if that makes any diff).</p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to get the same serial number that you can get via WMI from the 'Win32_BIOS' class from member "SerialNumber." The problem is that I can't use WMI as this will have to run on older systems that don't have WMI installed.</p>
  
  <p>We basically have a series of machines with data encoded in this BIOS field so it can't be changed by the users, and we sometimes need this information to be output to a file and sent to us.</p>
  
  <p>I've found 'GetSystemFirmwareTable', but the minimum Win version is WinXP 64-bit. WMI is out of the question, and we already have code to read it from a directly mapped physical address, but the problem is that the software we use that allows us to map those physical addresses is tied to our software, and our software cannot run at this stage in this particular use case (licensing).</p>
  
  <p>As far as I've found, the only other way to map a physical hardware address from a user-mode application is to delve into driver territory and integrate some driver libraries into the application to allow it to map physical addresses.</p>
  
  <p>Is there some kind of shadow copy that the OS makes that I can access without a huge amount of configuration?</p>