Hi,
I am having a real dilema here that has costed me hours of googling with no results. Here's the problem:
I have successfully created a ram disk with the objective of making it much much more difficult for this installation to get infected with a virus for a computer. I am doing this in my attempts to study many fronts in making Windows as virus proofs and robust as possible.
The Ram Drive is a XP-1.vhd file of size 800MB
Operating System: TinyXP (nLited) c:\windows folder measures about 400MB
Next, I installed hardlinks and JunctionsXP to create junctions directories for XP. With this, I was able to Junction the following directories:
c:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop and
c:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents
To d:\RamDisk\User\Desktop and
d:\RamDisk\User\My Documents
Any documents and pictures saved on this computer wont get lost between reboots as they will be saved on the D drive which happens to be a real 500GB hard drive.
Also I created junctions for the c:\Program and files and the c:\documents and settings\all users
Next, I need wireless information to be saved between reboots, and here is where my dilema falls:
Windows XP (and Vista, 7 and 8 as well) Store the Wireless Zero Passwords and SSID list on the following registry file:
c:\Windows\System\Config\SOFTWARE
So, I though that maybe I could create a Junction for "C:\Windows\System\Config" and store the Config on Drive D. Although I was able to create the junction, Windows XP will not boot claiming that the registry is corrupted, so I reverted this change and it now boots.
Later on, I found out that Windows does not read Junctions at that early stages of boot, so Junctions are out of the question.
My next attempt to move the SOFTWARE registry file to Drive D consisted in copying this file to:
d:\Win\System32\Config\ (note, on Drive D)
Then I loaded up Regedit and proceeded to go to the following hive:
HKey Local Machine>System>CurrentControlSet>hivelist
Here I see a list of each registry files and its mount point. I can see that SOFTWARE is mounted here:
\Device\HarddiskVolume5\WINDOWS\system32\config\software
So, I though that the fix would be to change it to:
\Device\HarddiskVolume4\WIN\system32\config\software
the Mountpoint HarddiskVolume4 represents my Drive D partition and the Volume5 represents my VHD image
so, after I made that change, I restarted the computer, windows loaded, but when I went back to check on regedit, I see that SOFTWARE reverted itself back to its previous value of:
\Device\HarddiskVolume5\WINDOWS\system32\config\software
I have reached a dead end here, is there a program that can at least save registry changes elsewhere?? I have read about Faronics Data Igloo which suppose to do this job, but it requires the dreaded .Net Framework 2.1 or greater which would add an extra 400MB to my TinyXP installtion -- NOWAY!! and besides its not freeware, so I am mainly looking for non-framework freeware utilities or the proper registry key that will accept the change I am trying to do.
Thanks