Calling of GetVolumeInformation returns empty serial number

[Durumdara]

Hello!

Eryk, your solution is the best solution for me:

    os.stat(drive).st_dev

I don't need the real ID. I write a Recycle Bin manager in Python - for my
machine only.
It just simply registers all rec. bin files to an SQLite DB (only the new
ones with a date).
After 30 days it deletes too old registered recycle bin files.

Without the serial the external drives make more records for one file (E:\,
F:\, G:\).
And because of different drives I may search in wrong drive (on deletion
process the registered E:\...\x.dcu is on G:\., so I can't find it).
But with this code is I can substitute the drive + RecBin folder with the
serial, and later I can search it in good drive.

Thank you!

dd


2017-11-07 13:10 GMT+01:00 eryk sun <eryksun at gmail.com>:

> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 7:58 AM, Durumdara <durumdara at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I want to get the serial number of the drives (without external modules
> > like Win32 or WMI).
>
> The volume serial number is more easily available as
> os.stat(drive).st_dev, which comes from calling
> GetFileInformationByHandle. Note that despite using the volume serial
> number (VSN) as the nearest equivalent of POSIX st_dev, there is no
> requirement that the VSN is unique or even non-zero. The same applies
> to the file index number that's used for POSIX st_ino. For example,
> both values are 0 on a WebDav drive, for which Python's implementation
> of os.path.samefile is useless. Practically speaking, however, it's
> good enough in most cases, especially for mounted disk volumes.
>
> That said, maybe what you really want is the hardware (disk) serial
> number -- not a volume serial number. The easiest way to get that is
> via WMI. You can use subprocess to run wmic.exe if you don't want an
> external dependency. You can also get the disk serial number by
> calling DeviceIoControl via ctypes. This is a fairly complex
> IOCTL_STORAGE_QUERY_PROPERTY request, with an input
> STORAGE_PROPERTY_QUERY structure requesting the StorageDeviceProperty.
> The result is a STORAGE_DEVICE_DESCRIPTOR structure that has a
> SerialNumberOffset field that's the byte offset from the beginning of
> the buffer of the serial number as a null-terminated string.
>
> Getting back to the VSN, note that the mount-point manager doesn't
> rely on it as a unique identifier. For associating volume devices with
> logical DOS drives and volume GUID names (i.e. names like
> "Volume{12345678-0000-0000-0000-123456789abc}", which are used to
> mount volumes as NTFS junctions), the mount-point manager queries a
> unique ID via IOCTL_MOUNTDEV_QUERY_UNIQUE_ID. Sometimes the volume
> driver returns a unique ID that's very long -- over 200 bytes. This
> doesn't matter because it's only used to uniquely associate a GUID
> name (and maybe a DOS drive) with the given volume when the system
> boots. This association is persisted in HKLM\System\MountedDevices.
>