how to determine USB Flash drive manufacturer?

Question

I need my program to work only with certain USB Flash drives (from a single manufacturer) and ignore all other USB Flash drives (from any other manufacturers).

is it possible to check that specific USB card is inserted on windows using .NET 2.0? how?

if I find it through WMI, can I somehow determine which drive letter the USB drive is on?

Answer 1

EDIT: Added code to print drive letter.

---

Check if this example works for you. It uses WMI.

Console.WriteLine("Manufacturer: {0}", queryObj["Manufacturer"]);
...
Console.WriteLine("    Name: {0}", c["Name"]); // here it will print drive letter

The full code sample:

namespace WMISample
{
    using System;
    using System.Management;

    public class MyWMIQuery
    {
        public static void Main()
        {
            try
            {
                ManagementObjectSearcher searcher =
                    new ManagementObjectSearcher("root\\CIMV2",
                    "SELECT * FROM Win32_DiskDrive");

                foreach (ManagementObject queryObj in searcher.Get())
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("DeviceID: {0}", queryObj["DeviceID"]);
                    Console.WriteLine("PNPDeviceID: {0}", queryObj["PNPDeviceID"]);
                    Console.WriteLine("Manufacturer: {0}", queryObj["Manufacturer"]);
                    Console.WriteLine("Model: {0}", queryObj["Model"]);
                    foreach (ManagementObject b in queryObj.GetRelated("Win32_DiskPartition"))
                    {
                        Console.WriteLine("  Name: {0}", b["Name"]);
                        foreach (ManagementBaseObject c in b.GetRelated("Win32_LogicalDisk"))
                        {
                            Console.WriteLine("    Name: {0}", c["Name"]); // here it will print drive letter
                        }
                    }
                    // ...
                    Console.WriteLine("--------------------------------------------");
                }      
            }
            catch (ManagementException e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(e.StackTrace);
            }

            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

I think those properties should help you distinguish genuine USB drives from the others. Test with several pen drives to check if the values are the same. See full reference for Win32_DiskDrive properties here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394132(VS.85).aspx

Check if this article is also of any help to you:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/csharpgeneral/thread/48a9758c-d4db-4144-bad1-e87f2e9fc979