Boot to Ram from DVD

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Dietmar,

You should know that there is no such thing as impossible, it is just a matter of time and knowledge required for something to be
done. Simple as that.
But like I said I do not see a reason why you would want to do this in the first place. What are your top arguments. Boot speed is
obviously not a reason.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Dietmar]

Hi Slobodan,
I like do do things, that none had done before.
Many years ago I put Win95 on CD and from there complete to ram.
This works until today, no fear of Viruses or anything else.
If You have Gigabit network for example, no single Disk up to now has this
velocity.
I read a thread, that someone succeed to put XPPro on CF.
From there it is a short step to try Ram boot.
XPe works for me very well, and so I believe it could come to a good end.
The only thing I dont like is the 500MB barrier. But this seems to be not
importend.

I have 6 days holyday
I will succeed
Dietmar

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Dietmar,

I like do do things, that none had done before.
Many years ago I put Win95 on CD and from there complete to ram.
This works until today, no fear of Viruses or anything else.

No fear of viruses? You must be joking right? Where have you been till this time, viruses that destroy OS files are the least
concern in these days. Trojans that exploit your computer resources should be more concern to you. Also usually you need to save
some working data on some persistent storage and that can be a problem. Write Protecting medium is not a problem and it is easily
accomplished with some hardware types in combination with RAM EWF.

If You have Gigabit network for example, no single Disk up to now has this
velocity.

Yes this is in theory only and it will work if you make your custom BIOS and server software. Current PXE implementations made by MS
and BIOS manufacturers are painfully slow :-(

I read a thread, that someone succeed to put XPPro on CF.
From there it is a short step to try Ram boot.

Ok I can boot XP Pro from USB disk also (Actually I can install it there), but I do not see any relation with RAM boot.

XPe works for me very well, and so I believe it could come to a good end.
The only thing I dont like is the 500MB barrier. But this seems to be not
importend.

500 MB compressed size would be around 700-800 MB of pure XPe files. Which is much bigger than you will make with any legal XPe
project. And you can always redirect non boot essential files to second ramdisk.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Dietmar]

Hi Slobodan,
my partitions size of compressed NTFS is 890MB, DirextX9c, ATI9700 All in
Wonder and Soundriver Audigy included also Giganet Intel 1000 Pro.
Now I think, that 890MB is not the problem to do SDI boot
to Ram from harddisk.

Dietmar

 

[KM]

Slobodan,

Yes this is in theory only and it will work if you make your custom BIOS and server software. Current PXE implementations made by
MS
and BIOS manufacturers are painfully slow :-(

Actually, it all comes to the Intel protocol specification. Some piece of work. (MS, who targets mass production devices, couldn't
pick up anything else but PXE.)
When they drew that specification they thought of very small boot program files to be transfered over network with TFTP.
One wants to start tweaking protocol first to impove the situation and then higher level software, if you really need good boot
performance for alrge OS files. And, of course, one better do any work rather with MFTFP if he thinks of many clients to boot.
Some companies and individuals have done that anyway (but out of standard).

My two cents,
Konstantin

 

[KM]

Dietmar,

So, did you create a working SDI file with 890Mb size and it botted fine?
Could you show us the steps then?

Konstantin

 

[Dietmar]

Hi Slobodan and Konstatin,
things are going very well...hihi.

Thank you so much Slobodan for the advice to
take another ramdisk.sys driver.

Dietmar