BIOS Calls

Hi there.

I would love to learn C some day, I program in many other languages, QBASIC..VB...a TOUCH of C, XBASIC, GFA BASIC, JAVA (a little), javascript, a bit of Asm etc...

OK, I making this important program in VB and I need to know this:

can someone, kindly, make me a C DLL file which will do the following:

go into the BIOS and get the capacity of the HDD that is on the Primary Master Channel?

that's all!!!

WHY? well, the program I am making is needing the HDD capacity in order to perform some partition calculations. The HDD MAY be unpartitioned so I need it to get the value from the BIOS, is it possible?

I would appreciate this, I would also like to know what parameters or how to get the output of this DLL file into VB, so VB can asscociate/take the capacity value that this DLL file has got from the BIOS so I can continue running other code/instructions in the VB MAIN program.

Please, I would appreciate this, just a simple task.

Thank-you in advanced :)

This forum isn't here for people to ask for their work to be done for them, it's here as a helper for those learning the language.

yes I know and already do relize this but it is very difficult for me as I don't know C and also, very hard for a first time programmer in C who doesn't even know what he is doing. I just thought that someone somewhere may have already done it or may have some guidelines or something that i may have or follow.

You cant make BIOS calls in windows from a user mode app...

You can use a published API.......lookup DeviceIoControl on MSDN....

hmmm....not quite exactly what i was looking for, but thank-u. I'm sure there must be a way to call BIOS functions etc... from a win32 APP? Surely? :-s

Quote:

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Originally posted by Tech
hmmm....not quite exactly what i was looking for, but thank-u. I'm sure there must be a way to call BIOS functions etc... from a win32 APP? Surely? :-s

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Driver prog.....or a gate hack......other than you use the API......the simple point is that you dont need the BIOS....

A breif play around with the APIs led to this

Code:

---

#include <windows.h>

//Because I have an old version of the SDK on this com..
//...I have to define this stuff
typedef struct _DISK_GEOMETRY_EX { 
        DISK_GEOMETRY Geometry; 
        LARGE_INTEGER DiskSize; 
        BYTE Data[1];
} DISK_GEOMETRY_EX;

#define IOCTL_DISK_GET_DRIVE_GEOMETRY_EX  \
        CTL_CODE(IOCTL_DISK_BASE, 0x0028, \
        METHOD_BUFFERED, FILE_ANY_ACCESS)

//End definitions

int main()
{

        DISK_GEOMETRY_EX gde = {0};
        DWORD dwDummy;
        char szBuff[50];

        HANDLE hDisk = CreateFile("\\\\.\\PHYSICALDRIVE0",
                GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE,
                FILE_SHARE_READ | FILE_SHARE_WRITE,
                0,OPEN_EXISTING,FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL,0);
        if(hDisk == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
        {
                MessageBox(0,"Unable to get Handle",0,MB_OK);
                return 1;
        }
        if(DeviceIoControl(hDisk, IOCTL_DISK_GET_DRIVE_GEOMETRY_EX,
                0,0,&gde,sizeof(gde),&dwDummy,0))
        {
                wsprintf(szBuff,"Number of bytes on disk - %I64d",gde.DiskSize);
                MessageBox(0,szBuff,"",MB_OK);               
               
        }
        else
        {
                MessageBox(0,"Unable to communicate with device",0,MB_OK);
        }

        CloseHandle(hDisk);
        return 0;
}

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This should work for Windows XP...and maybe Windows 2000 as well...unfortunately I cant test it properly as none of my disks has more than 1 partition at the moment....but if that isnt the proper call, I guess you could achivie this a similar way

Fordy hit the nail on the head for you need. Assuming you know how to call Win32 API's from VB (I don't), you can start here and then read this (look down to "Physical Disks and Volumes" to get a handle to a disk (formatted or not)).

MSDN is your resource for the Win32 API. After reviewing (and trying) those, post addition questions in the Windows programming board if you need additional clarification on the API's.

gg