Enumerating all available drive letters in Windows

c++ winapi drives
sharkin picture sharkin · Nov 13, 2008 · Viewed 30.5k times · Source

I want to enumerate all available drive letters (which aren't already taken) in Windows using VC++.

How can I do this?

Answer

JTeagle picture JTeagle · Nov 13, 2008

::GetLogicalDrives() returns a list of available (read: used) drives as bits in a mask. This should include mapped network drives. Thus, you can simply walk the bits to find bits that are zero, meaning no drive is present. If in doubt, you can always call ::GetDriveType() with the drive letter + ":\" (":\\" in C code, or _T(":\\") in Unicode-aware terminology, of course), and that should return DRIVE_UNKNOWN or DRIVE_NO_ROOT_DIR if the drive is available.

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