RamDisk98 Windows 95/98 RAM Disk Software New Version 0.5! Now Windows 95 Compatible! What is RamDisk98? RamDisk98 is a Windows port driver that emulates as fully as possible the low-level functionality of a hard disk (up to 2GB!) or a 1.44MB or 2.88MB floppy drive. The boot sector of the disk is complete enough to permit the disk to be made bootable with the sys command. RamDisk98 is the only RAM disk driver for Windows that allows you to create a bootable disk image in RAM (that I know of anyway). RamDisk98 also supports much larger disks than Microsoft's ramdrive.sys (which is limited to 32MB). The RamDisk98 drive can also be compressed using Windows DriveSpace. For RAM disks configured as hard disks, RamDisk98 can be configured to allow the user to select the drive letter. In addition, RamDisk98 can be configured to automatically load a disk image at startup and save the image to disk at shutdown. This allows the RAM disk to function almost exactly like a hard disk - no data is lost when the power is turned off! In addition, it makes RamDisk98 an ideal tool for creating disk images for bootable CD- ROMs. Why would I want a RAM disk in Windows anyway? Ordinarily one would think that you might be better off letting Windows manage the disk cache, memory and swap file for optimal performance. There are two exceptions: filesystem testing and disk image creation. In my case, I wrote RamDisk98 because I wanted to be able to create a 2.88MB bootable floppy image for use on a bootable CD-ROM, but I didn't own (and couldn't seem to get at a reasonable price) a 2.88MB floppy drive, let alone the ED media for them. I tried other RAM disks but I wasn't able to make them bootable, and in any case they were real-mode drivers anyway which made them a pain to use. What I really wanted was a simple RAM disk that I could create the filesystem I wanted on, and then snapshot the disk to an image file to be burned on the CD-ROM. RamDisk98 is implemented in the form of a port driver that can be installed/removed multiple times within a session without rebooting. This makes it easy and convenient to use whenever you need a quick RAM disk. In addition, the ability to use RamDisk98 to create load images automatically makes it a neat, self-contained solution to many RAM disk problems. Can RamDisk98 improve Windows performance? Several people (who have 128MB+ RAM) have reported to me improved Windows performance if they put the Windows swap file on a RAM disk drive. I don't have any benchmarks available to back this up, and your mileage may vary, but feel free to give it a try. I would be rather surprised if Windows memory management were so pitiful this would make a dramatic improvement. Detailed benchmarks are welcome! Several users have reported speed increases of 10-20% in database applications, compiler performance, and web cache when using a RamDisk98 drive as the host disk. One possible use of a RamDisk98 drive (suggested by a user) would be to improve the performance of multimedia applications by placing the multimedia file on the RamDisk98 drive to improve access time. In general, any application that does a lot of disk I/O (and is not processoe bound) should see a performance improvement when running on a RamDisk98 disk. Can RamDisk98 help find extraterrestial life? John Rudolph (rudolphj@hotmail.com) writes: "You may know about this already, but there is a very interesting program named "Seti at Home" the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. By networking hundreds of thousands of PC's, its very effective at analyzing space noise. Download from the University of Berkeley CA at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu. This is a highly compressed small program which is very disk access intensive. RamDisk98 speeds it up by 20% without wear and tear on disk drives." I'd say that's pretty cool... Sys, DriveSpace, Format, and Scandisk: A RamDisk98 disk can be made bootable using the sys command. It can also be compressed using DriveSpace. Both of these are possible because RamDisk98 emulates a hard or floppy disk as completely as possible; Windows can't tell the difference. ( Remember that when using the sys command, the current working drive is used as a source for the operating system files; if this is not a bootable disk partition the sys command will fail. Try using the full form of the command, "sys c: f:" which will transfer the bootstrap from source drive c to destination drive f.) Windows will properly format a RamDisk98 disk configured as a hard disk using the Windows utility (right-click on the drive icon in My Computer). It will not, however, work for RamDisk98 disks configured as floppy disks (the 1.44MB and 2.88MB disks) or with the format command issued from the command line. The reason for this is that the format command expects to get certain BIOS information that is not present for the RamDisk98 drive when it is configured as a floppy. DriveSpace works normally on a RamDisk98 drive, and can be used to increase the storage of a RamDisk98 drive in the same was as for a regular hard disk. If a compressed image is stored and loaded on startup (see below), the compressed volume will be mounted automatically. Installation Instructions: To begin with, completely uninstall any previous version of RamDisk98. Instructions on how to do this can be found below. Begin by installing the Visual Basic 5.0 Runtime Libraries, available here. These libraries are required for RamDisk98 to function properly. Installation instructions are include with the zip file. Next, download the RamDisk98 distribution below and unzip the files into a temporary directory. You should have the following files: readme.txt readme.htm ramdsk98.exe ramdsk98.pdr ramdsk98.inf docs.htm (directory) Installation is done via the Windows '98 Add New Hardware wizard in the Control Panel. Double-click on the wizard icon in the Control Panel and follow the instructions. When prompted to have the wizard search your system non Plug-and-Play hardware, choose "No, I want to select the hardware from a list." Select Hard disk controller from the menu, and tell the wizard you "Have Disk ...". A dialog box will come up asking you where the files are located; enter the path to the directory where you unzipped the RamDisk98 drivers. After this you will be presented with a box showing you a "RAM Disk Controller" . Select the RAM Disk Controller and tell the wizard to Finish installation. This will install the RamDisk98 controller on your system, copy the driver and executable files, set up the registry entries, start the driver with the default values (10MB hard disk), and a configuration window will be presented. Configuring RamDisk98: When the RamDisk98 driver is loaded it reads configuration information from the Windows system registry. This information consists of a key and set of subkey values that determine the disk type and size, drive letter, and whether or not image files will be loaded and/or created. The key is located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\RamDisk98, but please don't edit it directly! RamDisk98 includes a handy configuration utility to do this for you: A description of the configuration entries and their function is listed below: Disk Type: Allowed values are HDC for a hard disk, or FDC14 and FDC28 for a 1.44MB or 2.88MB floppy disk. If HDC is specified, then the Disk Size entry is used to determine the disk size. Disk Size: Specifies the size of the disk in MB for the HDC Disk Type only; this entry will be grayed out for the FDC14 or FDC28 disk types. Note that memory for the disk is allocated in 4kB memory pages. Any value you enter here will be rounded to the nearest 4kB. Enable User Selected Drive Letter: Specifies that RamDisk98 should use the drive letter specified in the box below. If this box is not checked, RamDisk98 will use the next drive letter on your system. Beware - this may or may not be the drive letter that will be assigned when you reboot, depending on the configuration of your system! If you specify a drive letter that is used by another disk partition on your system, RamDisk98 will default to the the first available drive letter. Drive letter selection is only available for the HDC disk type; the drive letter selection boxes will be grayed out. Load Disk Image On Startup and Save Disk Image On Shutdown: These check boxes determine whether or not an image file will be loaded when the driver starts or saved when the driver is exited (for example, system shutdown). A check will enable disk image load/save; an unchecked box will disable the disk image load/save. The image file will be read from/written to the path specified in Load Image Filename and Save Image Filename, described below. Please note that loading/saving image files for large disks (64MB+) can take a substantial amount of time at system startup and shutdown. Be patient, all of that data has to be read from/written to your hard disk! If an image file cannot be located on startup the driver loads with an empty (formatted) disk. If an image file cannot be opened on shutdown, no image file will be created and no error message will result. If there is insufficient disk space in the specified path, the output file will be truncated. Finally, do not attempt to load an image file for a size other than that of the current RamDisk98 configuration! Doing so will result in (at best) a corrupted RAM disk or (at worst) system failure. Load Image Filename and Save Image Filename: An ascii string that specifies the full path and filename of the image file to be loaded or saved when the Load Disk Image On Startup and Save Disk Image On Shutdown boxes are checked. Clicking on the Cancel button will exit the configuration program without saving your changes to the Windows registry. Clicking the OK button will save the current values to the registry and bring up the dialog box shown below: The new driver settings will not take effect until the driver is restarted. The easy way to do this is to click on Restart, especially if you want RamDisk98 to claim a drive letter that is currently used by another device in your system (for example, a CD- ROM). This will shut down Windows so that RamDisk98 can be properly restarted with the rest of the operating system. If you want to stop and restart the driver manually using the Device Manager, click on the System button. Finally, click Cancel if you want to exit the configuration program without restarting the RamDisk98 driver. Special Notes: The RamDisk98 registry entries are read once when the driver initializes. The driver must be stopped and restarted for modified registry entries to take effect (see below). Also note that at boot the RAM disk will not be available until Windows is fully initialized, so you will not be able to copy files to the disk from autoexec.bat. You could, however, automatically copy files to the RAM disk using a batch file in your Startup folder. An even better way would be to use the automatic image load/save features to restore the drive automatically at startup. Uninstalling/Stopping/Starting the RamDisk98 driver: Removing the port driver is as simple as installing it - just go to the System icon in the Control Panel and double-click. Under the Device Manager tab, highlight the RAM Disk Controller entry in the Hard Disk Controllers section and click Remove. The port driver will be uninstalled and the disk it was controlling will be removed. Alternatively, if you think you might want to use the disk later but just want the memory back for now you can choose to "Disable in this hardware profile" under the properties menu for the RAM Disk Controller. In this way you can start the disk back up again quickly whenever you need it (without rebooting!). You may also want to disable and restart the driver because you have modified the registry entries. When you disable the driver, the disk associated with it (listed as RAMDSK98 RAM Disk) will be disabled and appear in the Device Manager listing with a red X (as shown below). You can restart the RamDisk98 driver by clicking the Enable Device button (see below) under the properties menu for the RAM Disk Controller. The driver will restart, creating a new disk from the current properties listed in the system registry. Who wrote this software? I did (John Lajoie, lajoie@iastate.edu). The RAM disk driver core in RamDisk98 is based upon the source code provided with Walter Oney's excellent book Systems Programming for Windows 95 from Microsoft Press. What I did was to pick up where he left off by trying to improve the boot sector initialization of the disk (and fix a few of Walter's bugs) to properly emulate a hard disk or a 1.44MB or 2.88MB floppy drive. I also added the registry interface and disk image load and save, as well as the shareware splash screen and configuration utility. If you have any problems with the software, feel free to contact me at the address above. I can't guarantee you a solution, but I'll try! Will RamDisk98 work in Windows '95? From version 0.4 onward RamDisk98 is compatible with Windows 95. How do I register the software? You may download and use the shareware version for evaluation purposes. The shareware version of the software contains an annoying reminder to register that is not present in the registered version, and will default to a 1.44MB floppy after the software is used 100 times. If you like it and find it useful, please support ongoing development efforts and register the software by sending $20 U.S. to: John Lajoie 710 Keystone Dr. NE Ankeny, IA 50021 Checks, money orders and international money orders are accepted. Once your registration is received, I will email you a password that will allow you to download the registered version of the software from this site. Updates and upgrades are free to registered users. The software is also available on CD-ROM for an additional $5 U.S. Site licenses for multiple copies are also available: Single Copy $20.00 U.S. Copies 2-10 $15.00 U.S. ea Copies 10+ $10.00 U.S. ea Of course, the software provided is without warranty of any kind (see the disclaimer ). Use this software at your own risk - I am not responsible for any loss of data that may occur! Revision History: 2/15/99: Version 0.1 - First release. 3/01/99: Version 0.2 - Added 32, 64, 96 and 128M hard disk options. Hard disk cluster size and FAT type now set by disk size to match what is used by DOS/Win. 4/26/99: Version 0.3 - Cleaned up a few minor issues with disk format and minimized cluster size. Added automatic image save/load feature. Disk size and type configuration is now done via the registry, so there is only one port driver for all disks. Source code removed from shareware distribution. 5/21/99: Version 0.4 - Bug fixes, changed shareware splash screen and updated documentation. Added configuration utility and the ability to set the drive letter for hard disk emulation. 6/17/99: Version 0.5 - Fixed a bug in image save on shutdown. Optimized the load/save procedure to speed it up a bit. Changed "Reboot" to "Restart" in configuration utility. Problems? Contact lajoie@iastate.edu.Download Driver Pack
After your driver has been downloaded, follow these simple steps to install it.
Expand the archive file (if the download file is in zip or rar format).
If the expanded file has an .exe extension, double click it and follow the installation instructions.
Otherwise, open Device Manager by right-clicking the Start menu and selecting Device Manager.
Find the device and model you want to update in the device list.
Double-click on it to open the Properties dialog box.
From the Properties dialog box, select the Driver tab.
Click the Update Driver button, then follow the instructions.
Very important: You must reboot your system to ensure that any driver updates have taken effect.
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