How to programatically determine if a drive is DVD-RW/CD-RW under Windows?

Question

I want to block the user to backup files to optical discs, so I have to determine if a CDROM drive is writable.

How to do under Windows?

Answer 1

You can use method used by open-source CD/DVD recording application InfraRecorder (git repo).

InfraRecorder is using ckmmc library to get list of compatible devices using ckmmc::DeviceManager class (it supports multiple devices, of course).

First it scans for all devices using ckmmc DeviceManager::scan(), and then checks if device is a recorder using method MmcDevice::recorder().

You would think that there must be easier way to do this using something like GetDriveType() or DeviceIoControl(), but unfortunately it is not that simple.

ckmmc supports two different device access methods: ASPI (Advanced SCSI Programming Interface) and SPTI (SCSI Pass-Through Interface). To get drive properties it actually sends SCSI commands to the device, and only then it can analyze SCSI mode page and tell which recording modes (CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, etc...) hardware supports (if any).

Answer 2

The drive index (0 = A, 1 = B, etc) for the Windows CD burner can be found in the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CD Burning\DriveIndex.

Answer 3

As this page explains: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb776153%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

GetRecorderDriveLetter will return drive letter which is a burner (if exists) or it will return an error code if there is no drive which could burn a CD.

If you need more samples, just search the API