Re: why you can't find ramdrive in your system
Hi all,
Actually 95 and 98 does use ramdrive.sys during installation of certain
OEM version of the setups. What happens is if you have a blank harddrive
and want to install windows on it you start it up with a floppy and boot
from the floppy. The floppy disk cannot hold all the files needed therefor
a ramdrive is created and the path environment variable is set to the ram
drive so that the install diskette can load multiple drivers for different
types of hardware before the actual install starts. This method beats having
a 3 disk install startups like other OS'es ie...NT, OS2, Linux, Free BSD,
and others. But those have the ability to boot from the CD I have only seen
one OEM version of Win95 that could boot from the CD and for the life of me
I cannot remember where at the moment. If you like I can send you a copy of
the boot disk in a compressed *.zip file in which you can inspect the
config.sys and autoexec.bat... The one I have here is for Win98 OEM from
DELL.
Thanks,
JKinsey
-----Original Message-----
From: Euphoria Programming for MS-DOS
[mailto:EUPHORIA at LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU]On Behalf Of Michael R. York
Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 1999 8:22 AM
To: EUPHORIA at LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject: Re: why you can't find ramdrive in your system
To introduce myself, I'm Mike York and I've been a lurker here on
the list for about a month. Anyway, on to the point.
There would be no need at all to use ramdrive.sys during install of
windows 95 simply because ramdrive.sys is built to hog memory. Ramdrive
creates a superfast virtual disk in the physical memory of your machine. As
has been stated, windows 95 needs as much memory as possible to do its
install (considering it has 11 million+ lines of code). It would simply be
silly for windows 95 to use ramdrive.sys during install. Anyway, if this is
such a big issue, why don't you e-mail someone at Microsoft about the
question? They may be a big worthless company, but they still rely on all
the little people around to buy their product.
______________________________________
Michael R. York
Database Coordinator/Development Department
Phone: (610)647-4400 x3137
Fax: (610)251-1668
Email: myork at immaculata.edu
----------
From: Kat[SMTP:KSMiTH at PELL.NET]
Sent: Monday, August 16, 1999 4:24 PM
To: EUPHORIA at LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject: Re: why you can't find ramdrive in your system
----- Original Message -----
From: Norm Goundry <bonk1000 at HOTMAIL.COM>
To: <EUPHORIA at LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU>
Sent: Monday, August 16, 1999 1:53 PM
Subject: Re: why you can't find ramdrive in your system
> The reason you can't 'find' windows:ramdrive.sys active in your operating
> system is simply because IT ISN'T. If you read my email carefully you
will
> notice that I stated that it was used during the INSTALL of the operating
> system. It (ramdrive) has to strap itself in as E:, that is why you have
> to leave it alone in regards to it picking its drive letter. It erases
> itself after it has done its prepatory work (one such necessary thing is
> for it to establish HIMEM so that Windows can do its install within it).
> It is NOT active once the install is completed; I never said that it was.
Ok, i looked again in Unauthorized Windows95 (by Andrew Schulman), page 50,
in chapter2: Watching Chicago Boot, at a SoftICE dump of Chicago booting up,
and while drivespace and himem.sys is loaded, ramdrive was not loaded. Himem
was loaded even tho it wasn't in the config.sys. After loading some dos7
version 16bit code, Win95 goes on to load it's VXDs in XMS, and begins
taking some operations from 16bit dos and moving them into 32bit dos7.
Specifically mentioned is V86MMGR taking over from himem.sys (page 57-59).
Ramdrive has nothing to do with ems/xms drivers, or the processor mode,, it
*can* use himem.sys to use xms, or the emm api to use the ems page, but
ramdrive also has switches to use only the lower 640k in real or v86 mode.
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