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From: kooijman@duteca (Richard Kooijman)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Number of drives on system, how do you find out the ...
Summary: How do you get the exact number of drives on a system with partition
Keywords: MS-DOS, drives
Message-ID: <1085@duteca4.UUCP>
Date: 19 Oct 90 12:06:24 GMT
Organization: Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Lines: 19

How do you find out what the actual number of drives is on a MS-DOS computer?
I have programmed a utility like NCD. It searches all disks on the computer
to build a database of directories. Later this database can be used to switch
quickly to another directory.
The problem is that I haven't found a descent way to search all drives.
I program in Turbo C and I have used setdisk(drive) which returns the number of
logical drives. On my system (40Mb harddisk with 2 partitions C: & D: and NO
ramdisk) it returns 5, so it includes a drive E:. I know I can set LASTDRIVE=D:
in my CONFIG.SYS, but I don't want to do that.
Later I tried the function biosequip(), but it returns the number of physical 
drives, in my case 3 (A: B: C: or \x00, \x01, \x80 actually).
I have the utility working by just trying to get the current directory of
the drives, and when this fails it stops, starting at drive C: of course.

Who knows a better way, thanks in advance.



Richard.