I am now retired having been in the industry for 47 years. During that time I learnt several valuable lessons: 1. Is the client an individual, a small company or a large company. The bigger they are, the more reliable they are. The smaller they are the harder it is to get paid. 2. Try to get a full specification of what is required. The smaller they are the more vague the specification. In which case guide them by writing a proper specification and get their agreement. 3. Assess the development manpower cost and any external costs then add 25%. Quote on that subject to certain constraints: a. Work will be billed and paid for monthly. b. Monthly reviews will be held to discuss progress and problems. c. Any client changes will involve a revised cost estimate which must be approved. d. The client is liable to a cancellation fee if they drop out. 4. For 'unknown' clients try and get a credit rating check done. This worked for me, at one time I was turning over 750K UK Sterling a year. Hope this helps AGB

You don't work for HP do you?

Hi David Sorry to bug you again. My application was finished and put out for field trials. Yup - it hit a couple of problems (well quite a few actually). Most were trivial to solve. However, I am stuck with two, both related (one directly the other indirectly) to my original question. To help understand the setup, the application is XP platorm based and used primarily at the client office. Howeverm the application also needs to be used in the field (litteraly). So the client wanted the facility to copy work data files on to a second drive that could then be sent out to 'engineers' working in the field who could then interogate them on whatever they have there. The reason for getting the Physocal drive info wsa to ensure that the files were not written to the same physical drive. After writing, the target drive is removed and sent out. (The drive can be internal or external). (That is about the limit as to what I can disclose for security reasons). In my code, I used your solution to obtain the physical drive information. I compare the DriveNumber and PartionNumber numbers to enure they are different drives. This is fine. But I think that I should also be check which controller is being used as I could be blocking a drive that is actually on a different controller. So, Question 1 - How do I determine the drive controller? I have spent some time searching both MSDN and CodeProject and have not found an obvious answer. I think what I need to find are the four parameters as used in boot.ini to select the boot operating system. Now for the indirectly related problem. In practice, the client is using whatever hard drive comes to them from another source. Normally this drive is NTFS formated but some times it is FAT formated. I have no control over this and neither does the client. Out in the field I am using the file modified date from GetFileInformationEx(). This is because all files are loaded to be shipped out but, only those that have a later date to those exisiting in the field are used. However, we are getting problems with file dates. It appears that if you copy a file from NTFS to a FAT file system the date can change. The FAT system does not store the milliseconds, instead the time is rounded up. I could deal with this if it were consistant but, I have seen a direct file copy between two drives and the times have been different by as much as five minutes! In one instance, I actually witnessed the file date being two minutes ahead of the current time! Any thoughts on this one? Please? S

Hi David I was a bit suprised to receive your last mail. Most people don't bother to 'follow up'. Yes, all my stuff belongs in a museum. But, funds don't permit upgrades yet. I'm now in my 60's after over forty years in computing, single, live alone - hence working over the holidays. A couple of questions. In your solution you gave this format "\\\\.\\\\%c:". I assume this to be for extended filepath string length support. But the documenation with my old compiler has it as "\\\\.\\" Is this the norm for extended length support? Users are bound to come up super long path names. Also, in my application I also access network drives. Does the "\\\\pc name\\drive name\\" give this extended length support? Regards Andy Belton

Many thanks, that solved the problem. I had looked at DeviceIoControl() but my (outdated) Winioctl.h did not have is call param! Regards Andy