Win32 C++ detect USB-drive corruption

3
votes

I am working on a kiosk application using Windows 7 as the OS, and Win32 C++ to detect and manage USB drives. We just found a bug where, if a USB is corrupt in some way, the OS will pop up the following dialog which is hidden behind the kiosk application and therefore never gets shown.

image of the dialog

When a user goes to copy to this drive, the application crashes.

I have been looking for a way to detect when I get a USB DBT_DEVICEARRIVAL notification whether or not this newly added USB is corrupt, but haven't come up with any good possibilities. What I have come up with is the possibility of calling DeviceIoControl() and passing IOCTL_DISK_GET_PARTITION_INFO as the control code, since the PARTITION_INFORMATION structure returned can tell me whether the partition type is recognized or not. But this doesn't necessarily tell me whether the USB is corrupt. I assume this is more likely to tell whether this is a recognized NTFS format, as opposed to a format written by a Linux or Mac system.

Can anyone tell me how I could go about detecting corruption in a newly added USB drive, so that I can take the necessary next steps?

One more thing. I've tried to purposefully create a corruption on my USB drive so that I can emulate the issue found by our user, but Win7 seems to be smart enough to stop me from doing that. Does anyone know of a way to create a corrupted USB drive for test purposes?

1
c++winapiusbcorruption
Hmm, don't try to solve a big problem when you only have a small one. Copying a file to a disk drive should never crash your app. Lots more reasons why it would fail that don't have anything to do with a corrupted flash drive. Start by testing copying to a full drive, that's easy. – Hans Passant
In addition to fixing your crashing bug as suggested by Hans Passant, you may want to disable the popup from appearing: sevenforums.com/tutorials/… I haven't tried it, but an easy way to create a USB drive that would cause Windows to display this dialogue would be to physically remove a FAT32 formatted drive while in the middle of copying a large file to it. – Ross Ridge
Sorry about the delay in getting back. Pulled off on something else. I understand that there is an issue with my app crashing at all. That needs to be fixed, but I'm in search of a way to create the situation again so I can see exactly what was going on at the time of the crash. Codegaurd gave an answer below that seems to give me what I need. Thanks for the input. – bmahf
Continuing to look into this at the moment. Will post what I find. – bmahf

1 Answers

2
votes

You're incorrectly relating this to USB. Instead, it's a volume flag. Obtaining this status is possible via WMI, for example. See Win32_LogicalDisk.VolumeDirty - if TRUE, then disk requires chkdsk. Once you know the volume requires repairing, you can run chkdsk.exe from your program.

You can also use fsutil dirty query f: to check if volume requires repair, and fsutil dirty set f: to manually set this bit. That also allows you to make a test USB.

On some computers, Scan&Fix popup may be disabled. Still, if you set dirty bit, Scan&Fix will show computers where it's not disabled.

PS: I think you should figure why your app crashes and fix that as well. I believe that is a separate problem in your app.