Member Avatar for Kurtismonger

I have 20 or so hard drives that have accumulated over the years. We're in the process of moving to a new facility and my boss wants me to index all the drives and create basically a printed inventory of whats installed on them as well as all the Word, Excel, PDF, PPT and image files on each. I have a drive adapter that I can use to hook them up to my system. We also have common network drive where everyone throws everything that I need to index so it can be cleaned up. Ideally, I'd like something that could sort things by file type, create date, mod date, author, etc.
I started to write a PHP app that would dump this into Excel, but I'm wondering if there is anything already out there, preferably open source, that will do the job.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by johcastro

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Practical, low-effort plan for (builds on ’s GUI tip): do two passes per drive — a fast file-level export for printing/sorting, then a metadata pass for Office/PDF/images and an optional offline “installed apps” pass for system drives. Mount each drive, export CSVs per drive, then merge/clean in Excel. Run as Administrator (owner/registry reads need elevation) and test on one drive first.

Quick file-level export (fast, sortable CSV). Run this on each mounted letter to get names, types, sizes and timestamps:

Get-ChildItem -Path 'E:\' -File -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |
  Select-Object FullName,Extension,Length,CreationTime,LastWriteTime |
  Export-Csv -Path 'C:\inventories\E-drive-files.csv' -NoTypeInformation -Encoding UTF8

Add owner if needed with a calculated property using (Get-Acl $_.FullName).Owner (slow on many files). (ss64.com)

Extracting “Author” and other embedded metadata. For images/PDF/Office files use ExifTool (very flexible CSV export) or Apache Tika (wide-format metadata + batch mode). Example ExifTool command:

exiftool -common -csv -r "E:\" > "C:\inventories\E-drive-metadata.csv"

For large-scale content/metadata extraction use tika-app.jar in batch mode or with -m/-j to emit metadata. (exiftool.org)

If you need “what was installed” from a mounted Windows system drive, load the offline SOFTWARE hive and inspect the Uninstall keys (32-bit apps appear under Wow6432Node; some installs are per-user). Example:

REG LOAD HKLM\TempHive "E:\Windows\System32\config\SOFTWARE"
REG QUERY "HKLM\TempHive\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall" /s
REG UNLOAD HKLM\TempHive

Use caution and unload when done. (learn.microsoft.com)

Final tips: add a hash column (SHA256) for dedupe with Get-FileHash and export; for lightweight GUI searching/export try NirSoft SearchMyFiles and use WinDirStat for quick space/type overviews before deep scans. Merge CSVs in Excel and use filters/pivots for the printed inventory. (ss64.com)

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Member Avatar for caperjack

Hi, i have no idea what you are looking for but would just like to say when i want something i look to , www.google.com .easiest and fasted way i think . good luck

Member Avatar for Kurtismonger

Hi, i have no idea what you are looking for but would just like to say when i want something i look to , www.google.com .easiest and fasted way i think . good luck

Well, my post sort of explains what I am looking for, at least in general terms. I've already Googled for a solution, but posted here, where people with IT experience share ideas, with the hope someone had already solved a similar problem.
I suppose suggesting a Google search could be a response to every single post on this forum, but it's not terribly helpful.

Member Avatar for caperjack

what ever ! good luck finding a program

Member Avatar for slimeyapple

I found a post on a weblog that recommends a few different programs for what you describe.

I tried JdiskReport (available in multiple platforms too) AND ITS FREEWARE.

Worked on my Mac - worked on our PC. I hope this is helpful to you.

Link to post I found :

URL to download page of the program I selected. The post refers to a few different ones. I picked this because it was free.

Member Avatar for johcastro

Thanks dude u just saved my life here jajjaa my boss asked me to index all the company storage drive... and i forgot to do it and now i have like 6 hours left XD

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