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 wmic is a very complete tool

wmic diskdrive list 

provide a (too much) detailed list, for instance

for less info

wmic diskdrive list brief  

#C Sebastian Godelet mentions in the comments:

In C:

system("wmic diskdrive list"); 

As commented, you can also call the WinAPI, but... as shown in "How to obtain data from WMI using a C Application?", this is quite complex (and generally done with C++, not C).

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#PowerShell Or with PowerShell:

Get-WmiObject Win32_DiskDrive 

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Update Feb. 2022, Microsoft announces in "Windows 10 features we're no longer developing"

The WMIC tool is deprecated in Windows 10, version 21H1 and the 21H1 General Availability Channel release of Windows Server.

This tool is superseded by Windows PowerShell for WMI.

Note: This deprecation only applies to the command-line management tool. WMI itself is not affected.

Answer 2

One way to do it:

1. Enumerate logical drives using GetLogicalDrives

2. For each logical drive, open a file named "\\.\X:" (without the quotes) where X is the logical drive letter.

3. Call DeviceIoControl passing the handle to the file opened in the previous step, and the dwIoControlCode parameter set to IOCTL_VOLUME_GET_VOLUME_DISK_EXTENTS:

   HANDLE hHandle; VOLUME_DISK_EXTENTS diskExtents; DWORD dwSize; [...]  iRes = DeviceIoControl(     hHandle,     IOCTL_VOLUME_GET_VOLUME_DISK_EXTENTS,     NULL,     0,     (LPVOID) &diskExtents,     (DWORD) sizeof(diskExtents),     (LPDWORD) &dwSize,     NULL); 

This returns information of the physical location of a logical volume, as a VOLUME_DISK_EXTENTS structure.

In the simple case where the volume resides on a single physical drive, the physical drive number is available in diskExtents.Extents[0].DiskNumber