Detect Errored Devices on Windows XP with C#/pInvoke

Question

How do you query the status of all detected devices?

Where devices are USB connected hardware ( cameras, credit card readers ), PCI bus connected hardware, or hard drives. Anything that can show up as errored in the Device Manager is of interest.

Answer 1

While I've never tried it before, I think what you want to use is WMI: Windows Management Instrumentation. Specifically, you should look at the System.Management namespace.

Here's a tutorial I found that shows you how to query for hard drives connected to a system, and also how to query for running processes: --> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.management.aspx

Let me know if this helps. I've considered using WMI before for simple windows management tasks, but I've always ended up using simple registry scripts instead.

Answer 2

WMI works, but it's pretty slow and there are a lot of moving parts to go wrong. If you need faster/more reliable access, try the SetupDI APIs (see this). pinvoke.net can get you started with the C# declarations.