Differentiating between a CD drive and a DVD drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pete Davis
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Pete Davis

I'm trying to figure out how to distinguish a CD drive from a DVD drive. I
thought it would be as simple as using WMI, but the properties that would
distinguish between the 2 don't seem to exist (at least on my system).

Win32_LogicalDisk makes no distinction.

I thought I could with Win32_CDROMDrive, by using the MaxMediaSize, but that
property doesn't exist.

I then downloaded the MS WMI Tools and used the WMI browser. I can't seem to
find anything that distinguishes the two.

I need to be able to do this without any media in the drives, so checking
for free space won't cut it.

Anyone have any ideas?

Pete
 
Pete,

If you have the Win32_DiskDrive instance, you should be able to get the
Win32_PhysicalMedia instance for it, which represents the physical media
backing the drive (through the Win32_DiskDrivePhysicalMedia mapping).

Once you have that Win32_PhysicalMedia instance, you can look at the
MediaType property to get what kind of drive it is (it will differentiate
between CD, CDRW, DVD, DVDRW, etc, etc).

Hope this helps.
 
Unfortunately, Win32_PhysicalMedia only gives me one property for all 6
PhysicalDrives that I have: Tag. The Tag is: \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0, ...
\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE5

Additionally, the DiskDrive devices, oddly enough, don't include my DVD Rom
drives. It has my hard drive, the USB Storage device in my printer, and the
4 actual card slots in the USB storage device.

Don't know why the two DVD drives aren't there.

If I start from Wn32_CDROMDrive, I can get that, and Win32_PnPEntity. But
neither of these appear to distinguish between CD and DVD.

The only way I can see to possibly do it is to take the name or caption and
look for DVD in it, but that doesn't seem to be a very reliable way of doing
it.

Pete

Nicholas Paldino said:
Pete,

If you have the Win32_DiskDrive instance, you should be able to get the
Win32_PhysicalMedia instance for it, which represents the physical media
backing the drive (through the Win32_DiskDrivePhysicalMedia mapping).

Once you have that Win32_PhysicalMedia instance, you can look at the
MediaType property to get what kind of drive it is (it will differentiate
between CD, CDRW, DVD, DVDRW, etc, etc).

Hope this helps.


--
- Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]
- (e-mail address removed)

Pete Davis said:
I'm trying to figure out how to distinguish a CD drive from a DVD drive.
I thought it would be as simple as using WMI, but the properties that
would distinguish between the 2 don't seem to exist (at least on my
system).

Win32_LogicalDisk makes no distinction.

I thought I could with Win32_CDROMDrive, by using the MaxMediaSize, but
that property doesn't exist.

I then downloaded the MS WMI Tools and used the WMI browser. I can't seem
to find anything that distinguishes the two.

I need to be able to do this without any media in the drives, so checking
for free space won't cut it.

Anyone have any ideas?

Pete
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