Hardware manufacturers produce a lot of hardware. Some of these manufacturers like Dell, Hp, Huawei, Toshiba, etc. sell these products to the corporations. So we can call these products as enterprise products. These products generally provide extra warranty for enterprises. So They need to track the hardware they produced.
What Is Service Key or Tag?
The service key is some alphanumeric values used to uniquely identify the hardware. It is similar to the license keys of Microsoft, Adobe, Nero, etc. but in a simpler structure and fewer characters. There is also an alternative Express service code that is used to identify the hardware too. Below we can see of service keys and tags.
| Typical Service Tag | Its Express Service Code |
| 5EFDP01 | 124-123-356-01 |
Dell Products Containing Service Tag
As a giant manufacturer, Dell produces a lot of different products for enterprises and consumers. In order to track their support, warranty most of these products contain Dell Service Tag. Dell Service Tag is used for the following products of Dell.
- Laptop
- Desktop
- Tablet
- Thin Client
- Printer
- Monitor or Projector
- Enterprise Products
- Software
How To Find Service Key or Tag ?
As we can see the image below the service key can be read somewhere in the hardware. But in some situations, this may not appropriate and we need an alternative or more soft way to get service code.
BIOS
BIOS of Dell products list the service key in the main page of the BIOS menu. If you can not find the exact menu search for an information page to get service code.
Windows Command Line
Dell Service Tag can be located by using the Windows Command line tools like MS-DOS or PowerShell CLI. The wmic command provides the hardware serial number of the device with the bios get serialnumber parameters like below. Just type the following command and press enter on the command line which will list the serial number.
> wmic bios get serialnumberLinux, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, CentOS, RHEL Command Line
Similar to the Windows operating system Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, CentOS, RHEL, etc. provides a command-line tool to get Dell Service Tag. dmidecode is a command which provides detailed information about the system software and hardware. We will use the -s system-serial-number option in order to print Dell Service Tag. dmidecode command requires root privileges in order to list service tag so we will use the sudo command before dmidecode command.
$ sudo dmidecode -s system-serial-numberOperating System Tool
Operating systems provide some tools to get detailed information about the system. We can use these tools to get a service tag. Here are some of them.
How To Use Dell Service Tag?
By calling Dell Support Center and providing service tags code can be used to create issues about the hardware.