Whats the difference between GetLogicalDrives and FindFirstVolume+FindNextVolume?

Question

It seems that I do not quite understand the differences between Microsoft's definition to "Logical Drive" and "Volume".

Is every logical drive a volume but not the other way around ?

I would love to get an explanation + a simple example showing the difference.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365728(v=vs.85).aspx — David Heffernan, Feb 17 '15 at 14:03
Thanks for your reply, but it is still not clear what are the differences .. — f12394, Feb 17 '15 at 14:55
GetLogicalDrives returns the mapped drives. Volumes are different altogether. You can map a drive to a volume, or map a drive to a folder on a volume. Volumes don't need to be mapped. — David Heffernan, Feb 17 '15 at 17:28
Volumes do not have to have a drive letter, and drive letters can refer to things besides volumes (i.e. network shares). — Jonathan Potter, Feb 17 '15 at 18:02

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 11 '16 at 10:58

GetLogicalDrives returns bitmask value (which u can consider binary representation of an integer). this number, while tracing from left to write in binary format, gives you if the corresponding driver is present or not starting from A:. e.g. If you get the return value as 12, i.e. 1100, this shows tracing from left, A, and B drives are not present and C and D drives are present.

GetLogicalDrives doesn't include information related to system recovery volumes or windows reserved.

Whereas FindFirstVolume+FindNextVolume gives all the volumes present including Windows reserved and system recovery partition. the return value is a unique GUID for the volume which can also be found in registry.(HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2\CPC\Volume)

Whats the difference between GetLogicalDrives and FindFirstVolume+FindNextVolume?

1 Answers1