How would I retrieve the drive letter on which is Windows is installed?

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Since the HomeDrive is not always 'C' but can be 'D' or 'Y' or something totally unexpected how would I retrieve the System's Drive correctly?
There exists an environment variable %SystemDrive%, but I'm not sure if it is on every OS available. Messing with the Environment Variables is in generally not so good style. Some variables might be not there on another computer by a reason. So what else would I do to detect it correctly?

Posted 25-Feb-15 4:03am

Grumpyman

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CHill60 · Answer 1 · 2015-02-25T04:07:00

Solution 1

There are a couple of options discussed here[^]

From the link above...

C#

[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Auto)]
static extern uint GetWindowsDirectory(StringBuilder lpBuffer, uint uSize);

public string WindowsDirectory()
{
    uint size = 0;
    size = GetWindowsDirectory(null, size);

    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder((int)size);
    GetWindowsDirectory(sb, size);

    return sb.ToString();
}

then

var drive = System.IO.Path.GetPathRoot(WindowsDirectory());

will give you the drive it is installed on.

Posted 25-Feb-15 4:07am

CHill60

Updated 25-Feb-15 4:38am

v2

Comments

CHill60 25-Feb-15 10:31am

By "System" directory I took you to mean the Windows directory (most people would have). What do you mean by "System Directory"?? It's a very unusual situation to have all of windows on one drive and the windows system folder on the other - not sure that would work well

Richard Deeming 25-Feb-15 10:58am

No need for the P/Invoke - just use:
Environmment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Windows)

CHill60 25-Feb-15 11:10am

True - that was one of the suggestions on the link I supplied. I just grabbed the one that had been accepted as the answer - could have saved myself some cut&paste time if I'd gone for the simpler one :)