Sunday, May 20, 2007

XPe tip #38: Ramdisk drivers

Newbies on XPe often confuse the "Windows Ram Disk driver" component with a ramdisk that they may want to use a a temporarily file storage for things like Internet Explorer cache and etc. That component, however, is only a ramdisk driver that is used in RAM boot (Remote boot) scenarios and gets loaded by the loader to emulate the system running off a ramdisk (the entire image is copied to RAM and launched from there).
More info about the RAM boot can be found here.

There are quite many ramdisk driver for creating a device that can be used as a temporary storage available on the Web and created for Windows 2K/XP. For instance, the one from picobay.com.

However, I prefer not dealing with extra software licensing on XPe and tend to use sample driver from sources like Microsoft, CodeProject.com, CodeGuru.com and such where I can always modify the driver to meet my system requirements or simply compile it and use for free.
Here is a couple driver with their sources I used on XPe:
- Microsoft RamDisk sample driver.
Note: this one was created for Windows 2000 but an extremely easy to port to XP and the require porting steps are mentioned in the knowledge base article linked.

- CodeGuru's driver.

Note that for both drivers there are some settings (the ramdisk size and so on) that you may want to preset in the registry while integrating into your XPe.

Honestly I have happened to use other 3rd party ramdisk drivers on XPe but those were tied to customer's SKU's, required an additional license costs and not to be listed here. More ramdisk driver sources I mentioned in the newsgroup.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed your post,. I have been wondering about this topic,so thanks for posting. I’ll likely be coming back to your blog.
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Anonymous said...

Updated link:

FILE: Ramdisk.sys sample driver for Windows 2000

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257405