Cry How To...

List drive letters in a batch file or in a command window

At the command prompt

There are at least two ways of getting a list of drive letters when working at the command prompt.

1. The simplest is to use WMIC, for example:

wmic logicaldisk get description,name

which on my PC produces:

C:\>wmic logicaldisk get description,name
Description         Name
Local Fixed Disk    C:
CD-ROM Disc         D:
Local Fixed Disk    E:
Local Fixed Disk    F:
Removable Disk      G:
Removable Disk      H:
Network Connection  I:
Removable Disk      Z:

If I only wanted to list my local fixed disks I would instead use:

wmic logicaldisk where drivetype=3 get description,name 

and this would produce:

C:\>wmic logicaldisk where drivetype=3 get description,name
Description         Name
Local Fixed Disk    C:
Local Fixed Disk    E:
Local Fixed Disk    F:

If you specify the "drivetype" the different values you can use are:

2. An alternative is to use fsutil:

fsutil fsinfo drives

which on my PC produces:

C:\>fsutil fsinfo drives

Drives: C:\ D:\ E:\ F:\ G:\ H:\ Z:\

As you can see the output is different, fsutil doesn't return any of my mapped network drives. The other thing to note about fsutil is that it requires administrative privileges so you must "run as administrator" to use it.

For more information on fsutil see this Microsoft Technet article.

In a batch file

For a batch file I prefer to use wmic simply because it does not require elevated privileges. The following when copied into a batch/command file will simply echo the drive letters:

@echo off
for /f "tokens=2 delims==" %%d in ('wmic logicaldisk where "drivetype=3" get name /format:value') do echo %%d

Note that the "for" line should all be on one line - despite how it might be wrapped in the browser window.

When using this for real you will probably want to replace the echo with a call to do something on the drive. 

These notes have been tested with Windows Vista and may also apply to other versions of Windows.