EWF Questions

[Guest]

Hey guys, is EWF just to reduce wear on the CF drive, or does it prevent
writing to the drive completely? Our Solid State Disks are supposed to last
34-36 years at full writing capacity 24hours a day 365 days a year. But
we're looking to set the drive to read only, so that no applications could be
installed and no modifications will be allowed....can this be done?

 

[Daniel Simpson \(MS\)]

EWF is a write-protect filter that prevents writing to the media. EWF
intercepts writes made to a disk and stores them in either RAM or on a
second disk partition. When you reboot the system, any writes made to the
system are flushed (if they are stored in RAM) or are saved for later usage
(second disk partition).

To answer your question, yes, you would use EWF to maintain a consistent
state for your run-time image and applications.

Here's a link to the product documentation:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/xpehelp/html/xeconEnhancedWriteFilter.asp


Dan

 

[KM]

Mark,

Yes, this can be done with EWF.
You can create amn XPe image with EWF that will run from read-only media (CD, read-only CF, etc.).

Another solution for you may be using "WinPE" approach that uses a special switch to load the registry system hive as a volatile
hive such that changes made to it in memory are not saved back to the hive image. Search Google for "boot.ini /MININT".

KM

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Mark,

Actually RAM EWF will prevent the writes to partitions that you select, this is because of a way how EWF driver is implemented.
But all data written to protected partitions will stay in RAM unless you direct EWF to do otherwise.
So this will eliminate wear level on certain regions of CF.

Regards,
Slobodan