Question: How to change RAM Disk letter?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Slobodan Brcin
  • Start date Start date
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Slobodan Brcin

While using RAM boot from SDI I am limited to use C: as
ram drive.

Problem is that HDD C: is hidded by RAM Disk Driver.

Is it posible to change RAM Drive to D: or some other
letter.
If not how to remap hidden HDD C: volume to some other
available letter.

I need to mount all HDD volumes.

diskpart refuse to mount volume 0.

I'll try API call SetVolumeMountPoint, but I don't expect
better results.


Is there anyone who resolved this problem?


Best regards,
Slobodan
 
Hi Slobodan,
You cannot change the drive letter for the RAM disk. You should however be
able to assign drive letters to the physical disk drive once XP is up.
-Anil - This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights
 
Thanks, Anil.

I have already solved the problem last night, and responded to Pieter
question "Ramdisk and harddisk".
But it was too late and I forgot to answer to this thread.
You cannot change the drive letter for the RAM disk.
Click to expand...
Yes I can. I was desperate so I modified sys file, this approach I sometimes
use on my drivers to change path that is hardcoded. But there were other
problems with that approach (some parts of boot process go from volume
letter I assigned to ramdisk, and then something changes windows boot path
in registry to C: so rest of files are loaded from windows on C: partition).
This approach was useless waste of my time.
You should however be able to assign drive letters to the physical disk
Click to expand...
drive once XP is up.
Yes this was the first solution I discovered, but then I realized that if I
delete all values from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices.
And then make SDI image. XPE will find all partitions and will assign them
letters from D: and above.

Also one of idea that worked was to make NTFS partition in image, creating
folder and mounting Volume to this point.

Best regards,
Slobodan
 
Slobodan,

As I mentioned in a related thread, it is not possible to change the ramdisk
drive letter. It is hardcoded as "C:" for a reason. You've already looked at
the mounteddevice registry key, it should let you unmask the underlying
harddisk.

Thanks,
- Saad, MS

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
 
Thanks, Saad.

But as you can see(or there is a good chance that you can't) I already know
that. Since I have responded to this thread one hour before you (at least
according to message time), explaining this.

news server is very troubling lately. I'm using outlook express, direct web
access from communities.microsoft.com, and google. In OE I am missing great
deal of posts. And sometimes posts are late for more than 4 hours.

So it is possible that this is also affecting you.
I really hope that MS will do something to remove this problem with NG.

Thanks again,
Slobodan
 
I might have missed something here. I thought that Remote Boot was targeted
for diskless systems, and all support for accessing harddrives/local storage
was not available. Is this correct or are you doing something else?

Regards,

Sean Liming
XP Embedded Manager
A7 Enginering (www.a7eng.com)
Author: Windows XP Embedded Advanced and Windows NT Embedded Step-by-Step
 
I might have missed something here.
Yes, there are some small pieces of info here and there how to do this.
I thought that Remote Boot was targeted
for diskless systems, and all support for accessing harddrives/local storage
was not available. Is this correct or are you doing something else?
Click to expand...

First I'm not using remote boot, but I could it is all the same.
And you can use from local storage or from any storage this technique to
boot from SDI file.

Write to boot.ini.ramdisk(0)\windows="XPE RAM Disk" /fastdetect
/rdpath=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\bl.sdi /rdimageoffset=245760
Use google there are some info in this group on rdpath, and rdimageoffset.

Any medium that can boot ntldr. can boot XPE from RAM. Cool feature :)

So basically you can boot XPE from CD, Any USB Disk, Remote, etc, you name
it.

You will loose some memory but this is sometimes acceptable price to pay.
I have written my custom boot loader, for our future plans. But also you
could implement decompression or some other mechanism, than could reduce
size of image and speedup you system startup.

So as you can see this is perfect technology to use XPE for deployment
platform that can boot from everything, and always do thing you programmed
it to do.

Currently I need it for image deployments using USB Flash drive, since it is
the easiest way to access any device that has USB, and don't have CD.

I overcome last obstacle with drive letter assignment.

And it works perfectly :)

I'll try to write more info on this subject, during the next week, and make
it public.
And on some other useful things I found during this drive letter problem.

Best regards,
Slobodan
 
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