You may want to see if a certain usb thumb drive is (still, or again) plugged in to
this computer. Presuming you know what the hardware serial number is
{not the filesystem UUID or windows VOL e: command id number, which
are part of a particular filesystem on the media, but the hardware id assigned at the factory {although googling this I see some claims it can be hacked in the
field, with some effort}; doing this check from the cmd.exe or the bash command
line is not very hard, as it turns out.

If you're running redhat linux, do this at bash;
lsusb -v
and search the output for lines that have a left margin heading of "iSerial"
hopefully you will find the expected serial number there in one of the paragraphs. Drop the whitespace and the single digit line counter like 3 in
IManufacturer 1
IProduct 2
ISerial 3 07032A9AFF92284
You might also want to take notice of the idVendor and idProduct lines,
like 0x13fe and 0x4100 for the sample device I'm holding, as a match
for them but mismatch for serial number suggests the staff picked up a 'twin'
for the desired usb thumb drive, by mistake. Dunno how to display these
two halfwords from a windows cmd.exe; sorry...

If you're on windows {testing this on windows 7 but I suspect is widespread on recent releases} you want to dump all the registry entries {they are not numerous
and are all one-liners} in ...Services\partmgr\Enum
a) in general you can do this with a command supplied already for windows;
REG {on my box is in c:\windows\system32\reg }
So do this;
REG QUERY HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\
<<continuing long line here>>partmgr\Enum
I get backHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\system\currentcontrolset\services\partmgr\enum
0 REG_SZ Root\LEGACY_PARTMGR\0000
Count REG_DWORD 0x3
NextInstance REG_DWORD 0x3
1 REG_SZ SCSI\Disk&Ven_ATA&Prod_ST31000524AS\4&20155ac6&0&000000
2 REG_SZ USBSTOR\Disk&Ven_&Prod_&Rev_PMAP\07032A9A9FF92284&0
That last 'file', named just "2", is the entry for my thumb drive. USBSTOR is a bit generic;
then Disk&Ven string is empty, Prod is empty, REV is "PMAP",
then you see the serial number and the obligatory trailing &0 character pair.

b) in particular if your winbox has cygwin installed then even at cmd.exe you can use
the ls and cat commands to show what 'files' are in that 'folder' of the registry and
dump their contents to standard output; so either at a cmd.exe or a bash prompt do
ls -lh /proc/registry/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/
<<continuing long line here>>partmgr/Enum
to see something like
total 0
-r--r----- 1 Administrators SYSTEM 25 Jul 30 19:57 0
-r--r----- 1 Administrators SYSTEM 56 Jul 30 19:57 1
-r--r----- 1 Administrators SYSTEM 52 Jul 30 19:57 2
-r--r----- 1 Administrators SYSTEM 4 Jul 30 19:57 Count
-r--r----- 1 Administrators SYSTEM 4 Jul 30 19:57 NextInstance
and to dump "file" 2 for example can do
cat /proc/registry/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/
<<continuing long line here>>partmgr/Enum/2 to get back USBSTOR\Disk&Ven_&Prod_&Rev_PMAP\07032A9A9FF92284&0

My install of cygwin does not include the linux command lsusb but perhaps it is
available out on the internet for cygwin, somewhere... I just do not have much incentive to research that point given how easy it is to use the /proc/registry
"filesystem" to work around it...

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