How to list physical disks?

Question

How to list physical disks in windows? In order to obtain a list of "\.\PhysicalDrive0" available.

Answer 1

wmic is a very complete tool

wmic diskdrive list

provide a (too much) detailed list, for instance

Answer 2

From your own code, use GetLogicalDrives() first to get all of the drives mapped in the system, and then GetDriveType() to find out which sort of drive each one is.

Answer 3

GetLogicalDrives() enumerates all mounted disk partitions, not physical drives.

You can enumerate the drive letters with (or without) GetLogicalDrives, then call QueryDosDevice() to find out which physical drive the letter is mapped to.

Alternatively, you can decode the information in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. The binary data encodings there are not obvious, however. If you have a copy of Russinovich and Solomon's book Microsoft Windows Internals, this registry hive is discussed in Chapter 10.

Answer 4

I've modified an open-source program called "dskwipe" in order to pull this disk information out of it. Dskwipe is written in C, and you can pull this function out of it. The binary and source are available here: dskwipe 0.3 has been released

The returned information will look something like this:

Device Name                         Size Type      Partition Type
------------------------------ --------- --------- --------------------
\\.\PhysicalDrive0               40.0 GB Fixed
\\.\PhysicalDrive1               80.0 GB Fixed
\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0     40.0 GB Fixed
\Device\Harddisk0\Partition1     40.0 GB Fixed     NTFS
\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0     80.0 GB Fixed
\Device\Harddisk1\Partition1     80.0 GB Fixed     NTFS
\\.\C:                           80.0 GB Fixed     NTFS
\\.\D:                            2.1 GB Fixed     FAT32
\\.\E:                           40.0 GB Fixed     NTFS

Answer 5

I just ran across this in my RSS Reader today. I've got a cleaner solution for you. This example is in Delphi, but can very easily be converted to C/C++ (It's all Win32).

Query all value names from the following registry location: HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

One by one, pass them into the following function and you will be returned the device name. Pretty clean and simple! I found this code on a blog here.

function VolumeNameToDeviceName(const VolName: String): String;
var
  s: String;
  TargetPath: Array[0..MAX_PATH] of WideChar;
  bSucceeded: Boolean;
begin
  Result := ”;
  // VolumeName has a format like this: \\?\Volume{c4ee0265-bada-11dd-9cd5-806e6f6e6963}\
  // We need to strip this to Volume{c4ee0265-bada-11dd-9cd5-806e6f6e6963}
  s :=  Copy(VolName, 5, Length(VolName) - 5);

  bSucceeded := QueryDosDeviceW(PWideChar(WideString(s)), TargetPath, MAX_PATH) <> 0;
  if bSucceeded then
  begin
    Result := TargetPath;
  end
  else begin
    // raise exception
  end;

end;

Answer 6

I think this is a very good sample for your question, a little late but... its valid