Volume GUIDs – Ways To View/Access The Files Within

I have been working with Volume GUIDs more and more in our Hyper-V implementation and there has been a little bit of a learning curve in viewing, modifying, deleting etc… the files that now live on this volume without a drive letter.  I haven’t seen much out there on how to manage Volume GUIDs so I thought it would be a good topic for the blog. 

I have to plug Adam Fazio for leading to some of the info I have gained on this topic.

Like a normal volume, with a drive letter, there are 2 ways to view, modify, copy etc… files that reside therein. Explore in the GUI and Command line access.

 

Explorer View:  Just paste the Volume GUID in a RUN command.  This will give you the common Explorer view of your files that reside on the volume.

 

Command Line: dir \\?\Volume\\   i.e. dir \\?\Volume{fc247e42-0a5e-11dd-94db-001b785788b0}\\  The key to this one is to make sure you are using the second backslash at the end of the Volume GUID if you want to get to the root of the volume.  If you want to go to a known subfolder however all you need to do is \\?\Volume{fc247e42-0a5e-11dd-94db-001b785788b0}\FOLDERNAME.  No second backslash needed.

 

So this is a good step to being able to manage these types of volumes, but how do you get the Volume GUIDs.  In a webcast from Adam Fazio today he presented a Powershell script that displays all the Volume GUIDs on a local or remote server. [For remote, change localhost to a computer name or computer names. Separated by a comma.]

Get-WmiObject -class Win32_Volume -computername localhost | where-object {$_.name -like "\\?\*"} | select-object label, name, capacity, freespace | format-list

I have created a command file that runs this as a powershell script with a pause at the end to allow me to copy off the Volume GUID I am looking for.

NOTE:  Even though you can output all the Volume GUIDs of a remote server, at this time you cannot access the Volume  remotely. The above ways to access your Volume GUIDs can only be done from the localhost where they reside.

Hope this helps you out.

-Rob