Managing and Monitoring Disk Drives

Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Scripting Guide

Physical hard disk drives are the primary storage medium for information in any computing environment. Although organizations often use devices such as tape drives and compact disc drives for archiving data, these devices are not suited for day-to-day storage of user data. Only physical hard disks offer the speed and ease of use required for storing data and for running applications and the operating system.

To efficiently manage data, it is important to have a detailed inventory of all your physical disks, their capabilities, and their capacities. You can use the Win32_DiskDrive class to derive this type of inventory. As shown in Table 10.1, you can use the Win32_DiskDrive class to enumerate the disk drives installed on a computer and to return data such as the type of interface used by the drive, the drive manufacturer and model number, and the number of tracks, cylinders, sectors, and heads that compose the drive hardware.

Table 10.1 Win32_DiskDrive Properties

Note

• The values reported for TotalCylinders, TotalHeads, TotalSectors, TotalTracks, and TracksPerCylinder are obtained through extended functions of BIOS interrupt 13h. These values might be inaccurate if the drive uses a translation scheme to support high capacity disk sizes. Consult the manufacturer for accurate drive specifications.

Scripting Steps

Listing 10.1 contains a script that enumerates the properties of all the physical drives installed on a computer. To carry out this task, the script must perform the following steps:

1. Create a variable to specify the computer name.

2. Use a GetObject call to connect to the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) namespace root\cimv2, and set the impersonation level to "impersonate."

3. Use the ExecQuery method to query the Win32_DiskDrive class.

   This query returns a collection consisting of all the disk drives installed on the computer.

4. For each disk drive in the collection, echo the values of selected drive properties, including DeviceID (drive letter) and partitions, and total cylinders, heads, sectors, and tracks.

   Because the drive capabilities are returned as an array, a For Each loop is used to enumerate each capability.

Listing 10.1 Enumerating Physical Disk Drive Properties

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strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
 & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colDiskDrives = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
 ("SELECT * FROM Win32_DiskDrive")
For each objDiskDrive in colDiskDrives
 Wscript.Echo "Bytes Per Sector: " & _
 objDiskDrive.BytesPerSector 
 For Each strCapability in objDiskDrive.Capabilities
 Wscript.Echo "Capabilities: " & strCapability
 Next
 Wscript.Echo "Caption: " & objDiskDrive.Caption
 Wscript.Echo "Device ID: " & objDiskDrive.DeviceID
 Wscript.Echo "Index: " & objDiskDrive.Index
 Wscript.Echo "Interface Type: " & objDiskDrive.InterfaceType
 Wscript.Echo "Manufacturer: " & objDiskDrive.Manufacturer
 Wscript.Echo "Media Loaded: " & objDiskDrive.MediaLoaded
 Wscript.Echo "Media Type: " & objDiskDrive.MediaType
 Wscript.Echo "Model: " & objDiskDrive.Model
 Wscript.Echo "Name: " & objDiskDrive.Name
 Wscript.Echo "Partitions: " & objDiskDrive.Partitions
 Wscript.Echo "PNP DeviceID: " & objDiskDrive.PNPDeviceID
 Wscript.Echo "SCSI Bus: " & objDiskDrive.SCSIBus
 Wscript.Echo "SCSI Logical Unit: " & _
 objDiskDrive.SCSILogicalUnit
 Wscript.Echo "SCSI Port: " & objDiskDrive.SCSIPort
 Wscript.Echo "SCSI TargetId: " & objDiskDrive.SCSITargetId
 Wscript.Echo "Sectors Per Track: " & _
 objDiskDrive.SectorsPerTrack 
 Wscript.Echo "Size: " & objDiskDrive.Size 
 Wscript.Echo "Status: " & objDiskDrive.Status 
 Wscript.Echo "Total Cylinders: " & _
 objDiskDrive.TotalCylinders 
 Wscript.Echo "Total Heads: " & objDiskDrive.TotalHeads
 Wscript.Echo "Total Sectors: " & objDiskDrive.TotalSectors
 Wscript.Echo "Total Tracks: " & objDiskDrive.TotalTracks
 Wscript.Echo "Tracks Per Cylinder: " & _
 objDiskDrive.TracksPerCylinder 
Next