detecting drives for windows and linux

[BWill]

Hi, I'm writing a file browser, but I'm not sure how I could go about 
detecting the drives available on windows and linux systems (preferably 
using the standard modules if possible). I guess I could just try to 
list root on each letter of the alphabet for windows and see if it 
works, but that seems crude; besides, I want to know what kind of drive 
each drive/partition is (i.e. is it local and is it a harddrive or 
optical drive).

Thanks,

Brian