How does PC discover MAC address?

[jeena1]

How a hardware device discovers the MAC address of another in the event that it is unknown?

[Saist]

How a hardware device discovers the MAC address of another in the event that it is unknown?

check here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address

The MAC address is pretty much natively broadcasted for each card at the hardware level.

[sreyan]

Usually your computer will keep a table of mac addresses to ip addresses (arp table). Most operating systems have an arp command that can be used to look up mac addresses based on ip addresses if you are "close" to the other machine.

Unfortunately the actual arguments to the arp command vary from operating system to operating system, but their seems to be 3 main variants, windows/bsd/linux.

hope that helps