Virtual Disk drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Michael Chare
  • Start date Start date
M

Michael Chare

Is it possible to have a a virtual disk drive in Vista, so that the drive
has a letter such as X: and the contents are held in memory and therefore
completely destroyed when the computer is powered off.
 
Virtual machine and virtual disk are not the same thing.
I believe the OP is referring to what used to be called a ramdisk.
If anybody remembers the old dos settings to set up a ramdisk on bootup,
then they might be worth a try to see if they work here. However, I think
you'd need a boot.ini and/or config.sys and/or autoexec.bat file for that to
work. Does Vista even look for those at startup?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the contents of a virtual MACHINE do not get
wiped out when you power down the computer. I think you have to manually
destroy the virtual MACHINE and/or its VHD image.
A ramdisk, however, does lose everything when the machine's powered down.
 
DP said:
Virtual machine and virtual disk are not the same thing.
I believe the OP is referring to what used to be called a ramdisk.
If anybody remembers the old dos settings to set up a ramdisk on bootup,
then they might be worth a try to see if they work here. However, I think
you'd need a boot.ini and/or config.sys and/or autoexec.bat file for that
to work. Does Vista even look for those at startup?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the contents of a virtual MACHINE do not get
wiped out when you power down the computer. I think you have to manually
destroy the virtual MACHINE and/or its VHD image.
A ramdisk, however, does lose everything when the machine's powered down.
Click to expand...


You are quite right! I was sure that the idea was not novel and that I had
come across it before. Just forgot the term 'ramdisk'
 
Dave said:
You mean ramdisk? Found these, haven't tried any.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/

http://chris.pirillo.com/2007/11/06/how-to-set-up-a-ram-disk-for-free/
Click to expand...

Yes that is just what I want. Thank you.

I want to keep an encrypted file. I have found a little utility which will
do the encryption / decryption but I want to make sure that the decrypted
version is fully erased when I delete it.

Alternatvely are there any decryted file viewers. i.e. something that would
let me read the original contents of a text file that had been encrypted?
 
Michael said:
Yes that is just what I want. Thank you.

I want to keep an encrypted file. I have found a little utility which
will do the encryption / decryption but I want to make sure that the
decrypted version is fully erased when I delete it.
Click to expand...

Doesn't sound like a good idea to me. The contents of the ramdisk might
well end up in your swap file

Alun Harford
 
Alun Harford said:
Doesn't sound like a good idea to me. The contents of the ramdisk might
well end up in your swap file
Click to expand...

Some versions of vista support encrypted file systems.. these are for such
uses as these and yes remember to encrypt the drive the swap file is on.
 
Back
Top