How to find one's ethernet NIC's MAC address?

[John Gray]

What would be the easiest way to determine the MAC address of an ethernet NIC on a PC which has a completely empty hard disk?

I suspect we're probably talking Linux Live CD of some type, but I've just ploughed through most of the options on the Ultimate Boot CD and got nowhere (other than many crashes)...

[jonwallace]

Open the box and have a look at the label on the card? Or if you can boot from a linux distro (a USB one would do) and type ifconfig at a command prompt, the info should be buried in the output somewhere. Look in the section marked eth0 for something labelled HWaddr.

[John Gray]

Very few actual ethernet 'cards' in PCs anymore - the NIC is usually on the motherboard!

IFCONFIG seems like a good bet; just need to find a Linux Live CD that doesn't take a week to boot from a CD (no, the PC is old enough not to be able to boot from a USB Flash Drive).

[John Gray]

After trying a couple, I find that [Tiny] Core Linux at 9 MB boots very rapidly and just provides a terminal session, ideal for typing IFCONFIG (or with some distributions, IFCONFIG -a).

Thanks again, John!