Suppose you have a full path to an accessible file or folder on the system. How can I get some kind of unique identifier for the physical device that the file (or folder) actually resides on?
My first attempt was to use System.IO.DriveInfo which depends on having a drive letter. But UNC paths and multiple network drives mapped to the same physical device on a server add some complications. For example these 3 paths all point to the same folder on the same device.
\\myserver\users\brian\public\music\ s:\users\brian\public\music\ (here s:\ is mapped to \\myserver\) u:\public\users\music\ (here u:\ is mapped to \\myserver\users\brian\) Ultimately my goal is to take these multiple paths and report the amount of used and free disk space on each device. I want to combine these 3 paths into a single item in the report and not 3 separate items.
Is there any Windows API that can help find this information given any arbitrary full path?
This win API call should get you what you need regarding disk space
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364937(VS.85).aspx
Also, to determine if the three mappings all are from the same physical disk, perform a call to
and compare the returned volume serial numbers
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364993(VS.85).aspx