20 replies to this topic

[Limitless]

Hello my dear friends!
I am sorry for my english.

Very need run Windows 7 or Vista from RamDisk - primarily for not store data on hdd, and of course for high performance system for work.

Have laptop with 16Gb RAM, and installed Windows 7 Embedded Standard in VHD (3.5Gb VHD file).

Need befor boot OS, - create RamDisk , copy VHD file in RamDisc and run OS from VHD.
In this topic http://reboot.pro/10234/ , and this http://reboot.pro/9715/ - all ok with boot from RamDisk, but solutions is different.
My friends, please, help me with this question, in solutions from the above - I bad understand how to create ram disk befor OS loading.
May be you have more understandable and a new step by step solution? or, please, discribe more details in process of creating RamDisk and continue OS runing from Ram.

Thanks in advance!

[Wonko the Sane]

It seems to me that the tutorial/report by Karyonix:
http://reboot.pro/10234/
is very detailed.
Maybe you have problems with the ruined .html code (the one inside code boxes)? (this is due to a board software update that corrupted the contents)
If yes, use the converter:
http://reboot.pro/15275/
If not, please describe what is not clear to you.


Wonko

[Dynthor]

If you call that a detailed tutorial, then my A.D.D. is worse then i thought. I would also love to see a clear step by step tutorial on this. The more spoonfed the better

[Wonko the Sane]

JFYI :

detailed [ˈdiːteɪld]
adjective
1. comprehensive, full, complete, minute, particular, specific, extensive, exact, thorough, meticulous, exhaustive, all-embracing, itemized, encyclopedic, blow-by-blow, particularized a detailed account of the discussions
comprehensive short, limited, brief, slight, compact, summary, superficial, concise, condensed, terse, succinct, pithy
2. complicated, involved, complex, fancy, elaborate, intricate, meticulous, convoluted detailed line drawings

clear [klɪə]
adj
1. free from darkness or obscurity; bright
2. (of weather) free from dullness or clouds
3. transparent clear water
4. even and pure in tone or colour clear blue
5. without discoloration, blemish, or defect a clear skin
6. easy to see or hear; distinct
7. free from doubt or confusion his instructions are not clear
8. (postpositive) certain in the mind; sure are you clear?
9. evident or obvious it is clear that he won't come now
10. (of sounds or the voice) not harsh or hoarse
11. serene; calm
12. without qualification or limitation; complete a clear victory
13. free of suspicion, guilt, or blame a clear conscience
14. free of obstruction; open a clear passage
15. free from debt or obligation
16. (Economics, Accounting & Finance / Accounting & Book-keeping) (of money, profits, etc.) without deduction; net
17. (Business / Commerce) emptied of freight or cargo
18. (Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Forestry) (of timber) having a smooth, unblemished surface
19. Also in clear (of a message, etc.) not in code
20. (Linguistics / Phonetics & Phonology) Also light Phonetics denoting an (l) in whose articulation the main part of the tongue is brought forward giving the sound of a front-vowel timbre
21. (Individual Sports & Recreations / Horse Training, Riding & Manège) Showjumping (of a round) ridden without any fences being knocked down or any points being lost

I will continue calling it detailed, as well as you can call it NOT clear, the two things are not at all contrasting.

Just as it was told to member Limitless (that evidently does have some limit ):

.... please describe what is not clear to you.

A limited amount of spoonfeeding is granted (free of charge ) to new members , BUT you have to understand how the topic at hand is VERY advanced and relatively difficult to replicate if you are missing some basic prerequisites of knowledge.

Example:
First sentence:

I installed 8GB RAM in my computer and used GRUB4DOS to check size of RAM regions.

implies that you know:

• WHAT grub4dos is
• WHERE to find a recent enough version of it
• HOW to use it/start it/run it in command line mode

Wonko

[Dynthor]

Guess were not all as pro as you Wonka, but that so called tutorial read more like a commentary. A tutorial tends to omit the steps where a mistake or over/undercalculation is made. Looks like it didn`t quite make the cut for tutorial section either so I assume I`m not alone in my classification of it.

[sambul61]

Dynthor

Hey, just keep in mind. The author of that post karyonix didn't call it a Tutorial - that's the only thing that matters. He just posted a very detail report of a test that was for some reason interesting to him to run at that time. He is a very good developer, and often shared his findings with others. You have to admit that many other posts on this Board are a lot more scarce in details than this one.

Because he didn't intend it to be a Tutorial, it might not target novices - not surprising, given his professional level. He developed btw a very popular driver Firadisk, and also was advancing Grub4DOS features, so did plenty of useful things.

If you care to explain, why do you need to run Windows from RamDisk, and at what steps you face problems, someone may help you to move forward. Then, by analyzing the issues novices may face in reproducing that scenario, someone else might even decide to write a Tutorial on the subject for less experienced users. But you need to demonstrate, the subject is of common interest, useful for many.

Makes sense?

[Dynthor]

Ya, I didn't think it was supposed to be, and I wasn`t knocking his work or report, I was just responding to Wonka the wanker`s smart ass post. But thanks for taking an interest. Myself, I`m just trying to find the best way to boot and run in ram a win7 x64 I managed to shave down to under 4gb. Similar to the op i would like to put to use some of my excess memory. Even when gaming I never seem to use over 4gb, using a ati 5970 2gb and its pretty beastly, my only real bottleneck is my storage. I haven`t made the jump to an ssd as of yet so figured this be fun. I think its a bit behond my scope though, I`m not very familiar with grub, so was kinda looking to find whats possible as far as x64 and what if any restrictions my Raid-0 would have if I was to dirrectly map a partition to memory. I was even thinking about just putting the partition on a flash drive to boot up, then just make a mirror of system partition on superspeed ramdisk, then gank out the thumb drive lol

Edited by Dynthor, 25 December 2011 - 04:32 PM.

[sambul61]

Well, you're the lucky one.

One interesting scenario would be to run WES7 64-bit (Windows Embedded Standard) natively from a fixed VHD, loaded into RAM. You can try loading it with the regular map --mem G4D command space permitting, then chainload to Bootmgr on the VHD to boot WES (must add WinVBlock or FiraDisk driver to WES to support such method). Keep in mind, karyonix had only 8Gb RAM, but the OP 16Gb, so less worries. It would lessen the need to follow the above Report, and allow you to measure speed difference, when running OS from RAM compare to HD. WES7 itself is very good by any means.

title Boot Win7 Embedded Standard from VHD
find --set-root /vhd/Win7Emb.vhd
map --mem /vhd/Win7Emb.vhd (hd0)
map --hook
chainloader (hd0,0)/bootmgr
rootnoverify (hd0)

To prepare WES7 VHD, follow Boot Unsupported OS from VHD Tutorial. You can follow this route as well, when using your own Win7 version. Report any issues here. It may take some time to load the VHD into RAM though.

As far as RAID-0 goes, Windows will write all Temp files to the VHD in RAM Drive, and to RAM Drive itself if instructed to and its bigger than the VHD, or when free space inside VHD would become inadequate, unless you instruct it to use HDs, so it might not impose any restrictions on working with HD RAID for other ops, but you'll need to try.

[Dynthor]

Well I`m running with 8gb of ram as well so 4gb is bout all I could comfotably allocate for the vhd, how big is WES7 64-bit on average install? Does native boot vhd use virtual memory , would mapping a vhd to memory be akin to say mapping the pagefile to ram? I was also curious if there was maybe some sort of a bootdisc solution, is it possible to run say UBCD for example and mount and boot my partition with Imdisk from that environment?

Edited by Dynthor, 25 December 2011 - 05:47 PM.

[sambul61]

After installing quite a few apps, WES7 is about 6Gb, but minimal clean install on PC platform can be 1Gb or less. Its cousin Win7 ThinPC clean is about 3Gb, and can boot from a fixed VHD via Grub4DOS. You need to add WinVBlock or FiraDisk driver to WES7 & ThinPC to load and boot it from RAMDrive. After booting from VHD you can switch Off both Paging and Hibernation (if not switched Off by default), or redirect Paging to another drive of your choice. Mapping a VHD to memory would be similar to mapping a service ISO to memory like UBCD or such.




As to mounting a hard disk volume with ImDisk, I don't see the need and doubt the driver's ability to do that (because its not a Virtual Filedisk), but you better ask its developer. Many scenarios might be possible, if you can justify the need (pls not in this thread).

If you want to try first booting into RAM your existing OS volume (say located on 1st HD partition, defragged and shrunk to make it small enough to fit into available RAM), install FiraDisk onto the running OS, and use Grub4DOS Menu examples from FiraDisk thread to boot it into RAM. Just keep in mind, if you boot your OS volume into RAM, it might result in mounting 2 drives with the same OS after boot (RAMDrive and HD OS Volume), so your HD OS Volume Signature will be changed by OS, and to boot to HD again, you may need to reverse that change.

Another way to use extra RAM is to run several Virtual Machines (processor speed permitting) or RAM hungry Video Editing or CAD apps, or similar.

[Wonko the Sane]

@Dynthor
I can confirm, then, your A.D.D. is worse than you thought, you should see a doctor.

What I posted was meant to provide the following three messages:

• the linked to thread by karyonix, while being detailed, is NOT possibly clear to people that do not already have some basic AND some advanced knowledge of the topic
• notwithstanding the above, it is not rocket science, nor brain surgery, but being a VERY advanced topic it cannot be tackled if you miss these pre-requisites
• thus, if you want to follow it, please ask WHAT is not clear to you so that (hopefully) we can try and give you the information that karyonix assumed as "common knopwledge" (you see, you are new to the board and there is no way to know at which level you are, which info you might be missing)

It seems like none of them passed through.


Wonko

[Dynthor]

Hey Sambul, does winvblock, Firadisk or one similar have a version that does not require running in test-mode with 64bit os? I noticed Imdisk has 64bit sig but that would require a different approach. I read about something called vboot but it costs money, and looks way overpriced at that, maybe I can find a warez verson floating around somewheres.

Edited by Dynthor, 27 December 2011 - 05:08 AM.

[sambul61]

WinVBlock allows to boot a VHD from filedisk without loading to RAM, and doesn't have a fully signed driver version. FiraDisk expects loading VHD into RAMDrive, and neither has a signed version. VBoot is a bootloader that also installs its own signed driver into OS on VHD. We don't talk about warez here, but PM me the results of your search out of curiosity.

[Dynthor]

Hey Sambo , have you tryed either of these ramdrivers loading a vhd with 64bit os into ram? winvblock won`t even boot with testsigning on, and firadisk is giving me a couple problems when trying to boot 4gb image file. I`m pretty much at my witts end here though, have you had success actually booting a 64bit os and running it in ram via image or vhd? no luck finding vboot either, Btw whats with all the warez hate here, does site have some corporate sponsors or something? I tell ya that whole driver signing thing is criminal, can`t believe microsoft has gotten away with that, as if Bill gates really needed to nickel and dime everyone, hell, he should be the one paying people for making drivers for his os.

Edited by Dynthor, 05 January 2012 - 11:28 AM.

[sambul61]

Dynthor

Nice avatar. You can read that thread and links posted in it for more advice about fixing VHD boot issues. You can also post here exact error messages you are getting, and your HW and OS exact config. I did boot Win7 64-it from VHD via Grub4DOS & WinVBlock inside a VM and on real hardware in Test Mode (or F8 at boot) - it boots fine with a Test Signed 64-bit driver. But I didn't try to load an entire Win7 VHD into a RAMDrive and then boot from it, as it might make a little sense for me speed wise (unless done with specially configured small WES7 VHD, aiming for example to service the only HD available), and I don't have spare RAM to dedicate to this particular task, opting to use it for VMs.

Some people nonetheless may find it an interesting task, so pls share your exact detail experiences to draw some help. I adjusted G4D menu above. You may get more ideas on using FiraDisk for that purpose from FiraDisk Guide and its Walkthroughs, despite it's a bit dated and targets WinXP only. FiraDisk might be more stable in some cases after Win7 boot compare to WinVBlock.

[far.in.out]

So do you still need it?
Which section should such a tutorial go to? I wrote one in russian, using G4D and Firadisk. Can translate it and post. Just not sure where.
Also, can I post it on my site and supply a link to it? It's just that I don't like not having the ability to edit my posts here.

[Wonko the Sane]

So do you still need it?
Which section should such a tutorial go to? I wrote one in russian, using G4D and Firadisk. Can translate it and post. Just not sure where.
Also, can I post it on my site and supply a link to it? It's just that I don't like not having the ability to edit my posts here.

Sure you can post a link to it.


Wonko

[far.in.out]

K... So which section does it go to? Windows or G4D?

[Wonko the Sane]

K... So which section does it go to? Windows or G4D?

That is a good question.
Probably this:
http://reboot.pro/forum/116/
is the best place.


Wonko

[far.in.out]

Started a topic here
Run Windows 7 from RamDisk

[Dynthor]

ya i got going while back, tried so many times doing it with winvblock/winv7block hell every version of that driver would just bsod me, first thought it was to do with vhd format so tried image, eventually i scrapped the winv line of driver and gave firadisk a shot, low an behold booted up no sweat. hardest part was trimming down the 64bit os to under 3gb installed with drivers and maintaining the functions I needed.