Path: utzoo!yunexus!stpl!peterc
From: peterc@stpl.UUCP (Peter CAMILLERI)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Problems finding out how many drives a system has.
Keywords: MSDOS, BUGS
Message-ID: <188@stpl.UUCP>
Date: 19 May 89 13:48:39 GMT
Article-I.D.: stpl.188
Reply-To: peterc@stpl.UUCP (Peter CAMILLERI)
Organization: ISTS/Solar Terrestrial Physics Lab
Lines: 32

Hello Netland!

I am in the process of writing a "friendly" DOS shell program. One of the
things that I need to know is how many drives are present. Refering to
my copy of Advanced MSDOS I saw that the simple procedure was to

   1) Get the Default Drive using DOS FN 25   
   2) Set the Default Drive to the number obtained above using
      DOS FN 14, which as a side effect returns the number of Drives!

Neat Huh? Too bad it does'nt work, { In spite of the fact that the manual
says it should :-} It always returns 5 (Five) as the number of drives
despite the fact that I have only 3 (Three) A & B are floppies, and C
a hard disk. { I am running Compaq DOS 3.2 if it matters. } 

My current kludge is to use the equipmnet list to compute the number
of floppies, and get the allocation info on each potential hard drive
until I find one that does'nt exist. Problem here == SLOW SLOW SLOW !!!!

So what I ned is a FAST, RELIABLE way to find out how many drives a system
has.

P.S. I it makes any difference, I think you should know that I intend
     to present the reults of my work, source code and all, in a manner
     similar to the GNU stuff being done at the FSF. IE: free access only.


-- 
Peter Camilleri                              peter@stpl.UUCP
Elan Data Technology Inc.                    
836 Yonge St., Toronto, Ontario,             uunet!mnetor!yunexus!stpl!peter
CANADA M4W 2H1                               (416) 968-6668