How to get hardware MAC address on Windows

Question

I\'m playing around with retrieving the MAC address from the NIC - there are a variety of ways to get it, this article covers the most common:

http://www.codeguru.co

Answer 1

My guess is that in the linked CodeGuru article, the Miniport solution is likely to overcome the problem you describe, albeit painful to implement. The reason I think this is that I have used the GetAdaptersInfo solution myself in the past, and noticed that the MAC address will change without reboot when an adapter is added, e.g. a Bluetooth adapter providing PAN services.

Perhaps rather than rebooting after changing the registry setting, you could try stopping and restarting the relevent network services. You could easily check this manually prior to looking for a programmatic solution.

(n.b. the above is all guess work. If you try it and it works, perhaps add a post for those trying to do the same in future).

Answer 2

You can use WMI to enumerate the Win32_NetworkAdapter instances and look at the MACAddress property. The main issue with this technique is finding the appropriate adapter instance if you have multiple active adapters installed, e.g. on a laptop which also has a wireless connection.

Answer 3

Parse the output of ipconfig /all