How to get the drive letter from a full name of the drive

c# .net windows fileinfo drive-letter
James picture James · Aug 28, 2011 · Viewed 9.5k times · Source

How could the drive letter (e.g. F:\) be obtained from a known full name (if it is present) of a drive (e.g. WORKMEMORYSTICK) using C# under Windows?

Even the other way around would be a start.

Answer

Grant Thomas picture Grant Thomas · Aug 28, 2011

The DriveInfo class exposes a method to get all available drives (GetDrives), you could enyumerate these an match your given string. Something like the following ought to help get you there:

DirectoryInfo root;
var drives = DriveInfo.GetDrives();
foreach (var drive in drives)
{
    if (drive.VolumeLabel == label)
    {
        root = drive.RootDirectory;
        break;
    }
}

As mentioned by abatishchev, and not initially elaborated on due to the time requirements of my children, there is a potential problem in that you're only going to match the first drive which has that label, therefore you will need to account for this in your logic if your system requires it (though, determining which of two drives is the desired drive based on nothing but a non-unique string is no better than a guess, or as I mention below, asking the user (if this is input) which one they meant.)

Related questions

.NET FileInfo.LastWriteTime & FileInfo.LastAccessTime are wrong

When I call FileInfo(path).LastAccessTime or FileInfo(path).LastWriteTime on a file that is in the process of being written it returns the time that the file was created, not the last time it was written to (ie. now). …

Read More
How to delete a file after checking whether it exists

How can I delete a file in C# e.g. C:\test.txt, although apply the same kind of method like in batch files e.g. if exist "C:\test.txt" delete "C:\test.txt" else return nothing (ignore)

Read More
How do I start a process from C#?

How do I start a process, such as launching a URL when the user clicks a button?

Read More