NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

re: NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

oshah — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 13:17:50 GMT

On the subject of cyclic mount points,
you can also get the same thing if your program walks down shell links (shortcuts). One program I'm pointing the finger at is Winamp.

PS ConvertStringSecurityDescriptorToSecurityDescriptor() is longer!

re: NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

Random Reader — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 14:01:50 GMT

Just checking whether a directory has the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT attribute won't necessarily tell you if you're in a mount point though, right? The reparse tag could belong to a Junction, Remote Storage, or a third-party filter. You'd also want to check that dwReserved0 == IO_REPARSE_TAG_MOUNT_POINT.

re: NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

Reuven — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 19:27:35 GMT

The requirement to doubly call GetVolumeNameForVolumeMountPoint twice before is one that few people know about, and causes subtle bugs. Actually, this doesn't completely fix the problem. The mount manager stores the list of volume names in the registry, and it chooses the alphabetically earliest one as its the canonical name. If a new volume name shows up after you call GetVolumeNameForVolumeMountPoint twice, things still won't work!

What to do about this? Well you could ignore it. Calling GetVolumeNameForVolumeMountPoint twice almost completely fixes the problem; a new volume name showing up in that window is highly unlikely. Another possibility is to call GetDosDevice on both volumes and compare the device names. The device names will always match if the volume is the same, making this a safe comparison.

re: NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

AdiOltean — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 02:20:53 GMT

>>> Just checking whether a directory has the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT attribute won't necessarily tell you if you're in a mount point though, right? The reparse tag could belong to a Junction, Remote Storage, or a third-party filter. You'd also want to check that dwReserved0 == IO_REPARSE_TAG_MOUNT_POINT.

You are absolutely right.

re: NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

Roland Kaufmann — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 17:57:49 GMT

While we're at the subject; it would be interesting to know what "magic" that must be performed first to allow to specify a native path under \Device\LanmanRedirector as a reparse target to DeviceIoControl().

re: NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

AdiOltean — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 00:38:12 GMT

>>> While we're at the subject; it would be interesting to know what "magic" that must be performed first to allow to specify a native path under \Device\LanmanRedirector as a reparse target to DeviceIoControl().

What do you mean by "reparse target to DeviceIoControl"? DeviceIoControl is just a method to send IOCTLs/FSCTLs to any device in the system.

How to get the label from a volume on a hidden partition?

ms007 — Wed, 04 May 2005 22:59:24 GMT

Does anyone know how to pull the volume information for a hidden, or
unidentified volume? I'm mainly looking for the volume label, but
will
also need the disk extents to match them up.

Disk Management views this partition as a Healthy (Unknown Partition),
and also identifies the volume label. I can't see that
GetVolumeInformation works on anything but a Drive Letter or Volume
GUID, or am I mistaken? Any help figuring out how to read the volume
identifying information from a partition would be greatly appreciated!

re: NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

AdiOltean — Wed, 04 May 2005 23:44:54 GMT

>>> Disk Management views this partition as a Healthy (Unknown Partition), and also identifies the volume label. I can't see that GetVolumeInformation works on anything but a Drive Letter or Volume GUID, or am I mistaken? Any help figuring out how to read the volume identifying information from a partition would be greatly appreciated!

You might want to use the WMI API to enumerate all partitions on a disk, and get their properties. See the last sample code at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/wmisdk/wmi/wmi_tasks__disks_and_file_systems.asp for more details...

re: NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

Mike Cooper — Thu, 05 May 2005 02:13:37 GMT

Any idea how to get a Volume Name (\\?\Vol{GUID}) or drive letter for a given disk XX + partition XX? i.e. If I have a partition table for DiskDrive0 I need to find out what volume/drive letter is on DiskDrive0 Partition 1. I can't seem to find any API's or registry data which gets me there.

re: NTFS Curiosities (part 2): Volumes, volume names and mount points

AdiOltean — Thu, 05 May 2005 04:30:42 GMT

>>> Any idea how to get a Volume Name (\\?\Vol{GUID}) or drive letter for a given disk XX + partition XX? i.e. If I have a partition table for DiskDrive0 I need to find out what volume/drive letter is on DiskDrive0 Partition 1. I can't seem to find any API's or registry data which gets me there.

I added the response here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/adioltean/archive/2005/05/04/414806.aspx

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