I have been trying to implement some of the features requested in this forum and the 911cd forum lately. Time has come for a beta release. Version number of this beta is 1.0.3, latest stable release is still 1.0.2.
Some of the changes so far:
* It is now possible to extend the size of RAM-disks too. However note that the resizing of RAM-disks may take a long time because the driver needs to allocate a new block of memory with the new size, copy the contents of the old memory block to the new one and then release the old block. This means that RAM and CPU usage may be very high during the resize operation.
* The behaviour when creating a RAM-disk pre-loaded with an image file has changed so that the loading of the image file into the RAM-disk memory block is done after control has returned to the caller but before the driver actually starts service I/O requests for the virtual disk. This means that when a RAM-disk with pre-loaded image file is created from for example a batch file the batch file does no longer hang waiting for the RAM-disk to be completely loaded with the image file.
* It is now possible to format virtual disks directly from the Control Panel applet.
* When a new virtual disk is created using the command line tool imdisk.exe it is now possible to have the newly created virtual disk automatically formatted. This is implemented by imdisk.exe calling format.com after virtual disk creation. The new
-p command line option is used for specifying additional parameters to the format.com command line, such as switches for specifying filesystem, volume label etc. Type imdisk.exe without parameters for more information about this new option.
* Support has been added for mounting image files and specifying offset where the disk partition image begins within the image file. The new
-b command line option is used for this.
* It is now possible to double-click on a virtual disk in the list in the Control Panel applet to open the virtual disk root in a Windows Explorer window.
You can download this beta release here:
http://www.ltr-data....skinst_beta.exe(The link
http://www.ltr-data..../imdiskinst.exe is still the old 1.0.2 release.)
Special note about upgrading:
The new release has a new version number and some of the communication between driver and control applications has changed so that for example old version's command line tool is not compatible with this new driver version. If you already have an old version of ImDisk on your computer and upgrade to this new version and don't want to restart your computer after upgrade, make sure that the driver is not in use before upgrading. Also stop the driver so that the new version will be loaded after the upgrade.
To upgrade in a 'reboot-free' way:
* Open a Command Prompt.
* Type
imdisk -l. If it tells you that the driver is not loaded then you can just upgrade and ignore the rest of this guide.
* If the response is a list of numbers you still have virtual disks loaded. Delete them, either from command line or the Control Panel applet. Return to the Command Prompt and type
imdisk -l, it should now display the text
No virtual disks..
* Type
net stop imdisk to unload the driver.
* Now you are ready to run the new install package to upgrade the driver!
Note that this new release is a beta-release so far and should not yet be used in production and that this beta is published only here at boot-land. When it has been tested a couple of days I will replace the old version on my website with this new version.
Happy testing!