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POProgrammatically differentiating between USB Floppy Drive and USB Flash Drive in Windows
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copied!<p>On Windows (XP-7), is there a reliable way of programatically differentiating between USB floppy drives and USB flash drives in C++?</p> <p>At the moment, I'm using WMI to get updates when new <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394173%28VS.85%29.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>Win32_LogicalDisk</code></a> instances are detected, and then using the DriveType attribute of the LogicalDisk object to figure out a basic type. This works quite well, except that floppy drives and USB flash drives are both of DriveType <code>DRIVE_REMOVABLE</code>, so to differentiate between those (floppy vs. flash), I'm using the <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa510113.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>IOCTL_STORAGE_GET_HOTPLUG_INFO</code></a> interface to figure out if the device is hotpluggable, and was working on the principal that that meant it was a flash drive and not a floppy. Again, I think this works quite well (if a little inefficient, using both the WDK API and WMI to get info ) in the case of internal floppy drives, but unfortunately USB Floppy drives are also hotpluggable a lot of the time, so there is no clear way to differentiate between flash and USB floppy drives, that I can see. I know there are properties that <em>may</em> work, like checking if its mapped to the reserved drives A: or B (edit: only relevant if the machine definitely has a floppy drive - see <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MS-KB: How to change drive letter assignments in Windows XP</a>), or looking at the description, but I'd really like something a bit more reliable.</p> <p>Sorry about the long explanation, but just wanted to be clear! Thanks</p>

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