boot from local hard drive into ramdisk

[Greg Chu The Small]

Hi,

I have done boot ramdisk from a remote server.
But can I boot into ramdisk from a local drive?

I am thinking to run everthing in the ram, and use local hard drive as a
backup,

So when system boots, it will read local drive and boot into ram, and then
make local dirve to get into sleep mode or make it stop.

So we will not consume hard drive.

If local hard drive failed, then ask it to boot from remote server.

Please share your ideas!

Thanks!

Greg

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Greg,

Why would we share idea on simple thing as this?
You have working sdi file, right? If you do then search for /rdpath boot.ini switch.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...a=group=microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded.*

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Greg Chu The Small]

How do I put disk into sleep mode?
Thanks!

Hi Greg,

Why would we share idea on simple thing as this?
You have working sdi file, right? If you do then search for /rdpath boot.ini switch.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...a=group=microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded.*

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Greg,

This is a tough one, or at least I have not tried to do this trough API.
You can set XPe power management policy to disable HDD after one minute. (The cleanest solution.)

Or trough API try to use IOCTL_STORAGE_EJECT_MEDIA although I don't think that it will work.

Best regards,
Slobodan

 

[KM]

Actually, I think it is doable and the way is a bit easier than using IOCTL_
code.

I just wrote a test utility to do that (spindown.exe) and uploaded it to
www.xpefiles.com (Third Party, Shareware/Freeware folder). You may give it a
shoot if you will.

The console utility will work under 2K/XP but I highly recommend using it
under test XPe image only. It will change your hard disk spin down timeout
(at least to a few seconds, usually ~3 secs). According to MS documentation
the setting is not persistent, meaning that is does not get saved in the
current Power policy. However, I found that it is not exactly true and it
took a while for me to fix the problem and return everything back on my XP
Pro machine (just be careful ). Although, the utility now does the clean
up automatically (watch for the console app output messages).

The way this test app works is simple - you run it, press any key at prompt
and then see that it switches the disk to a *spin-down* mode. Wait there for
a few seconds (depends on your disk activity at the call time) and you may
notice the disk has been stopped (if it did not happen, you have a process
that keeps accessing the disk). Then press any key again and it will stop
and then clean-up the *spin-down* mode.

Make sure you've got powrprof.dll in your build and Admin permissions for
the account that you use to run the utility under.

Let me know if it does not work for you at all.

KM

PS. This component is only for testing purposes. Please be aware that it is
not a good practice to change hard disk spin down timeouts and lower them to
a minimum value.