A week ago my HP Mini 110 was stolen. I reported to the police and they asked me about my Laptop's MAC address, which I don't know or had never heard about before.
Is there any way to get the MAC address of my stolen laptop, as I have all the docs that prove my ownership of the laptop?
I've contacted HP to give me the MAC address, but they told me that it should be taken from the set itself and they can't help.
97 Answers
A MAC address looks something like this:
01:23:45:67:89:ab
It belongs to your network adapter and is used by the MAC sublayer to identify your computer on a network. It's not a unique identifier for various reasons (also explained in other answers here), but if you're lucky, you can trace back the laptop if it's ever found again.
Looking in your documentation …
If you can find it somewhere in your documentation that came with the laptop, then you're lucky. Apart from that, it'll be hard to find it elsewhere, although there are some possibilities.
WiFi access points you've connected to
If you've ever connected to a WiFi access point, you might be able to find your MAC address in its logs (or DHCP lease table) accessible through the access point's configuration website. This is because your laptop's MAC address is used as a unique identifier to tell the access point which IP address to assign. However, it's possible the access point already "forgot" your laptop, and it won't show it anymore.
A directly connected modem
In some cases, if your computer directly connected to a modem, its MAC address was used to identify it to your Internet Service Provider. In that case, you could check your modem configuration for the MAC address, or even your ISP registration forms.
I'd also suggest to look for the serial number of the laptop. It should definitely be available somewhere in the material that came with the machine. The serial number could also be on a warranty card, a sticker, et cetera.
However, note that MAC addresses can be changed – so there's no guarantee a knowledgeable thief hasn't already changed it, at least if the hardware allows that. The same goes for the serial number that's somewhere on a sticker (or even engraved) on your the machine. It's basically like stealing cars – even those could get new fake serial numbers if the thief is clever.
6If you connected to your home internet, there is a log in the router that stores all mac adresses and the IP adresses. If you computer has been stolen and you need to give them the MAC adress of your laptop you can get it from there.
Maybe I'm over thinking this, but MAC spoofing is relatively easy, and the address isn't even unique. Honestly, the only way you're likely to get your laptop back is if the thief accidentally leaves it somewhere, and even then, the police would need to find it, and you would have to somehow prove to them that it's yours. I honestly think that the best course of action would be to change any internet passwords that are remembered by your stolen laptop's browser, buy a new computer, and move on. I can only hope that you have backups of any important data.
I know this question is old, but today I had a similiar headache myself after finding out that my router already "forgot" my recently stolen Macbook. There is one way not mentioned here, the storage backup. If you have access to any kind of backup from your stolen laptop, it is possible there are some wifi diagnostic files included. Not sure about windows, but from my OS X backup I dug up the whole wireless diagnostics archive (thank God I had this problem with wifi once hehe) and one of the files it contained was wireless_diagnostics-ilTACd.log, which inside among other technical stuff had the MAC address of my MacBook :)
If you can get the serial number for your laptop, the manufacturer may keep records of MAC address tied to system serial number. It's a bit of a long shot, but since MAC addresses are unique, this is definately possible for a company to track.
14I don't mean to be a debby downer, but depending on the model of the network adapter, the MAC address can be changed. This may may make things a bit more difficult. They could have changed to something generic like DE:AD:BE:EF:20:12. On the other hand, this isn't something that is commonly known to be changeable because the stardard for years was that the address was "burned" in the chip by the manufacturer.
However, woliveirajr has a point in comment to your question in that if you have a router at home that you connect to, you stand a good chance of finding a log with all the different MAC addresses associated with their host name that has ever connected to it. Or if you you connect directly to the Web, your ISP may even be able to tell you the MAC address your modem has connected to it.
4I hope my answer is not given already. Usually the retail box also has the MAC and serial numbers as labels on it. Please notice, the Laptop may have several MACs, for WLAN and LAN. If you find the serial on the box, it might help more to identify the laptop.
Also check the retailers bill for serial / MAC.
