Skip to main content

PhysicalDisk and Volume Mapping information

After a long time, writing this post on Windows Disk Management. I was playing with volume management APIs and found it's quite easy to get some useful information like, how I know what are the volume(s) present on a physical disk. I'm talking about a hard drive here. Of course, the Windows disk manager will reveal it but why not I should have my own app. There are Windows Volume Management APIs including the very famous CreateFile API, which is one of the amazing APIs on Windows provided by Microsoft.

The objective was to build a tool that will tell How many HDDs are attached to the system with volume information. Here is the complete code:


const int BUFF_SIZE           = 512;
const int STR_SIZE              = 20;
const int DRIVE_ID_BUFF = 3;

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    TCHAR szTemp[BUFF_SIZE];
   
    if (GetLogicalDriveStrings(BUFF_SIZE - 1, szTemp))
    {
        TCHAR szDrive[DRIVE_ID_BUFF] = TEXT(" :");
        TCHAR* pDrive = szTemp;

        std::multimap < DWORD, TCHAR * > mapDriveVolume;
        std::map < DWORD, DWORD > mapPhysicaDriveCnt;
        HANDLE   hLogicalDisk    =    INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE;
       
        while(*pDrive)
        {
            pDrive += _tcslen( pDrive ) + 1;

            *szDrive = *pDrive;

            TCHAR szLogicalDrive[STR_SIZE];
            memset(szLogicalDrive, 0, STR_SIZE);
            _tcscpy_s(szLogicalDrive, STR_SIZE, _T("\\\\.\\"));
            _tcscat_s(szLogicalDrive, STR_SIZE, szDrive);
           
            if(_tcscmp(szLogicalDrive, _T("\\\\.\\")) != 0)
            {
                BOOL bResult            =    FALSE; // results flag
                VOLUME_DISK_EXTENTS    vDiskExtent = {0};
                DWORD bytesReturned        = 0;
               
                hLogicalDisk = CreateFileW(szLogicalDrive,     // drive to open
                            0,            // no access to the drive
                            FILE_SHARE_READ |    // share mode
                            FILE_SHARE_WRITE,
                            NULL,            // default security attributes
                            OPEN_EXISTING,        // disposition
                            0,                // file attributes
                            NULL);

                if(INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE == hLogicalDisk)
                {
                    wprintf(L"Error in CreateFile() API with error: %ld\n", GetLastError());
                }
                else
                {
                    bResult = bResult = DeviceIoControl(hLogicalDisk,            // device to be queried
                                IOCTL_VOLUME_GET_VOLUME_DISK_EXTENTS,        // operation to perform
                                NULL, 0,                    // no input buffer
                                &vDiskExtent, sizeof(VOLUME_DISK_EXTENTS),    // output buffer
                                &bytesReturned,                    // # bytes returned
                                (LPOVERLAPPED) NULL);                // synchronous I/O
                }

                LARGE_INTEGER extLength = vDiskExtent.Extents->ExtentLength;
                if(extLength.QuadPart > 0)
                {
                    // This is a valid volume
                   
                    mapDriveVolume.insert(std::pair < DWORD, TCHAR * >(vDiskExtent.Extents->DiskNumber, pDrive));
                    mapPhysicaDriveCnt.insert(std::pair < DWORD, DWORD >(vDiskExtent.Extents->DiskNumber, vDiskExtent.Extents->DiskNumber));
                }
            }

            CloseHandle(hLogicalDisk);
        }    // End of while

        for( std::map < DWORD, DWORD >::iterator ii = mapPhysicaDriveCnt.begin(); ii != mapPhysicaDriveCnt.end(); ++ii)
        {
            wprintf(L"Number of volume in physical drive %ld is %ld\n", (*ii).first, mapDriveVolume.count((*ii).first));
           
            std::pair < std::multimap >DWORD, TCHAR * >::iterator, std::multimap>DWORD, TCHAR * >::iterator > ret;
            ret = mapDriveVolume.equal_range((*ii).first);
           
            for (std::multimap < DWORD, TCHAR * >::iterator it=ret.first; it!=ret.second; ++it)
            {
                wprintf(L"Volumes in physical drive: %ld is/are %s\n", it->first, it->second);
            }
            wprintf(L"\n");
        }
    }

    return 0;
}

The output will be like the below:




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reversing char array without splitting the array to tokens

 I was reading about strdup, a C++ function and suddenly an idea came to my mind if this can be leveraged to aid in reversing a character array without splitting the array into words and reconstructing it again by placing spaces and removing trailing spaces. Again, I wanted an array to be passed as a function argument and an array size to be passed implicitly with the array to the function. Assumed, a well-formed char array has been passed into the function. No malformed array checking is done inside the function. So, the function signature and definition are like below: Below is the call from the client code to reverse the array without splitting tokens and reconstructing it. Finally, copy the reversed array to the destination.  For GNU C++, we should use strdup instead _strdup . On run, we get the following output: Demo code

Close a Window Application from another application.

 This is just a demo application code to show how the WM_CLOSE message can be sent to the target process which has a titled window to close the application. To achieve this, either we can use SendMessage or PostMessage APIs to send required Windows messages to the target application. Though both the APIs are dispatching WM_XXXXX message to target application two APIs has some differences, these are as below: 1. SendMessage () call is a blocking call but PostMessage is a non-blocking call(Asynchronous) 2. SendMessage() APIs return type is LRESULT (LONG_PTR) but PostMessage() APIs return type is BOOL(typedef int). In Short, SendMessage () APIs return type depends on what message has been sent to the Windowed target process. For the other one, it's always a non-zero value, which indicates the message has been successfully placed on the target process message queue. Now let's see how can I close a target windowed application "Solitaire & Casual Games" from my custom-

XOR (Exclusive OR) for branchless coding

The following example shows the array reversing using the  XOR operator . No need to take any additional variable to reverse the array.   int main(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) { char str[] = "I AM STUDENT"; int length = strlen(str); for(int i = 0; i < ((length/2)); i++) { str[i] ^= str[length - (1+i)]; str[length - (1+i)] ^= str[i]; str[i] ^= str[length - (1+i)]; } cout << str << endl; return 0; } The above example is one of the uses of XOR but XOR comes in handy when we can do branchless coding  methods like butterfly switch etc. Sometimes this is very effective in speeding up the execution.  Let's see one of the uses of XOR in branchless coding. I am taking a simple example of Y = | X |.  Yes, I am generating abs of a supplied number. So, my function signature/definition in C++ looks like below: int absoluteBranch( int x) {     if (x < 0 ) {         return -x;     }     else {         retur