Last night I was running some tools on a Windows 7 laptop and needed to list the drives. I am not very familiar with MS-DOS so I had to play around to find the information I was looking for. Luckily listing the drives and then querying drive information is easy to do from DOS in Windows 7. Follow the directions below to list the Windows 7 drives from DOS.
List Windows 7 Drives Using MS-DOS:
The fsutil command can be used from the Windows 7 DOS Command Prompt to first list the available drives and then to query specific drive information. Below are examples of using fsutil to find out drive information.
Use fsutil To List Drives On Windows 7:
Syntax To List Drives From DOS On Windows 7:
- C:\>fsutil fsinfo drives
- Drives: C:\ D:\ E:\ F:\
Use fsutil To Display Drive Type In Windows 7:
Syntax To List Drive Type From DOS On Windows 7:
- C:\Users\alex>fsutil fsinfo drivetype c:
- c: - Fixed Drive
Use fsutil To Display Volume Information In Windows 7:
Syntax To List Volume Info From DOS On Windows 7:
- C:\Users\alex>fsutil fsinfo volumeinfo C:
- Volume Name : OS
- Volume Serial Number : 0xb8XXXXXX
- Max Component Length : 255
- File System Name : NTFS
- Supports Case-sensitive filenames
- Preserves Case of filenames
- Supports Unicode in filenames
- Preserves & Enforces ACL's
- Supports file-based Compression
- Supports Disk Quotas
- Supports Sparse files
- Supports Reparse Points
- Supports Object Identifiers
- Supports Encrypted File System
- Supports Named Streams
- Supports Transactions
- Supports Hard Links
- Supports Extended Attributes
- Supports Open By FileID
- Supports USN Journal
Use fsutil To List Drive NTFS Information On Windows 7:
Syntax To List NTFS Information From DOS On Windows 7:
- C:\Users\alex>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo C:
- NTFS Volume Serial Number : 0x00bXXXXcbXXXXXX
- Version : 3.1
- Number Sectors : 0x000000001bf930ea
- Total Clusters : 0x00000000037f261d
- Free Clusters : 0x0000000002034233
- Total Reserved : 0x00000000000007b0
- Bytes Per Sector : 512
- Bytes Per Cluster : 4096
- Bytes Per FileRecord Segment : 1024
- Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0
- Mft Valid Data Length : 0x0000000017200000
- Mft Start Lcn : 0x00000000000c0000
- Mft2 Start Lcn : 0x000000000055efff
- Mft Zone Start : 0x0000000000eba840
- Mft Zone End : 0x0000000000ec4fa0
- RM Identifier: CB65E8E1-CFD9-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXB6A7A82
As you can see fsutil is a valuable tool to use from a Windows Command Prompt or MS-DOS. It provides an easy way to list the drives available on the computer and then query each drive individually to find out more information about the drive.
