Units, drives and volumes

This topic describes the concepts related to unit, drive and volume..

Classes TDriveUnit , TDriveInfo and TVolumeInfo encapsulate drive and volume information. Drive and volume information both include the attributes of the drive and the media mounted on it. The volume has additional information including the amount of free space on the media and its size.

A unit is a device which may or may not have a drive in it. For removable media, the unit is always present, but a drive may not be.

A drive may have from one to four partitions on it. Each partition represents a volume. The volume may or may not be formatted.

A maximum of 26 drives are available and they may be represented by letters ( A to Z ), or by numbers (0 to 25). To find which drives are available, use RFs::DriveList() to get the drive list. A TDriveList is an array of 26 bytes. Drive A has value 0, B = 1 etc. Any byte in the drive list which has a non zero value signifies that the corresponding drive exists. The byte's value can be used to retrieve the drive's attributes by using a bitwise AND with the corresponding drive attribute constant.

RFs::Drive() may also be used to get drive attributes.

Class RFormat allows a drive to be formatted in a series of steps. RRawDisk allows a disk’s data to be accessed in raw mode.