The system drive

Symbian OS allows a drive on a device to be marked as the system drive. The system drive is set up during device startup and cannot subsequently be changed. It has the following properties:

it is both readable and writable.
it is always available, cannot be removed from the device, and is secure.
it is non-volatile, which means that the drive is located on media such as flash memory or battery-backed RAM.

Typically, the system drive is used:

for storing persistent settings for system and application software.
for storing localisation resources.
as a default drive for user data.
as a target drive for installing software.

Getting the system drive

The system drive is identified by its drive letter. Use the function RFs::GetSystemDriveChar() to find the system drive letter.

If you also need to know the drive number, then you can use the function RFs::GetSystemDrive() to find this. However, getting the drive letter is the most common requirement.

[Note that in versions of Symbian OS before 9.2, the system drive number was fetched using the function BaflUtils::GetSystemDrive(). This function is now deprecated and should not be used.]