How to Perform a Full Hardware Inventory for a PC the Easy Way

In yesterday’s blog post I showed you how to locate, within the InventoryAgent.log, the delta hardware inventory cycle’s major and minor version numbers for an inventory task. I have worked with various versions of SMS/Configuration Manager for a long time and on occasion, the inventory will get out of sync. If you discover that the data being returned by a report or a query for a PC is not accurate, you will want to perform a full inventory in order to ensure that you are getting the most up-to-date information. So, in this blog post, I will show you how to perform a full hardware inventory for a PC – the easy way!

The simplest way to perform a full inventory for an individual PC is to use SCCM Client Center http://sourceforge.net/projects/smsclictr/ to force a full inventory.

1. Launch SCCM Client Center.
2. Connect the PC (CM12-CM4 in my example).
3. Click on the Client Actions tab.
4. Click on the HW Inventory (Full) option.

Here’s a screenshot of my delta hardware inventory version numbers prior to forcing a full inventory.

Once I perform the full inventory you can see from the log file that the major version number is incremented. And, the minor version number is reset to 0. Notice in the line above that the version numbers say it will perform a full inventory (full report).

If you are interested in forcing a full inventory the hard way, check out this blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/b/canitpro/archive/2013/09/04/step-by-step-forcing-a-full-hardware-inventory-for-sccm.aspx

Please let me know if you have any questions about how to perform a full hardware inventory for a PC – the easy way! You can contact me on Twitter at @GarthMJ or you can leave a note in the comment section below.