bootable ram disk windows 7

[BURNINGchicken3]

is it possible to boot windows off a ram disk? with out having to re install it each time?

 

[BFG10K]

No, a RAM disk’s contents are lost when the power’s cut.

You could try to automate some kind of cloning process pre-booting, but I’d question whether that would be faster than just booting off the slower medium to begin with.

 

[Arcube]

You can buy hyper drive or something similar
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

If you were looking to utilize your PC's ram as a BOOT OS drive then it is very difficult, ram is reinitialized as part of boot process so nothing can be persisted.

More over BIOS has to pass control to an OS after post so you would have to have a bios extension to create ram disk, install OS image using some non-volatile medium and then pass control.

Too complicated!

 

[hhhd1]

why ?

 

[Nothinman]

is it possible to boot windows off a ram disk? with out having to re install it each time?

No, that's why SSDs were created. RAM disks are created by an OS, the firmware that POSTs and boots the PC knows nothing about them. So to do that literally, you would need custom firmware to create the RAM disk and then it would have to load the data from some nonvolatile storage into the RAM disk before booting.

You could skip the custom firmware part and boot from another device (e.g. USB stick, CD, etc) and have that load the OS and data into a RAM disk. Most Linux Live CDs do something similar now. But the boot times are longer than normal because of the need to read everything from the other media into memory.

Windows is a whole other beast because it wasn't made to run that way. WinPE kinda does this, but it's very limited in functionality because it was only designed for installation onto nonvolatile media. You would have to do a significant amount of hacking to make Win7 run straight from a RAM disk.

 

[corkyg]

Get a SSD, install Win 7 on it, and you effectively have a bootable RAM disk.

 

[KingFatty]

Use sleep, windows will persist in the RAM so your computer will boot from that RAM disk sort of.

 

[Magic Carpet]

is it possible to boot windows off a ram disk? with out having to re install it each time?

Yeah but you need to buy special equipment with battery backup. It's expensive.

 

[Makaveli]

No, a RAM disk’s contents are lost when the power’s cut.

You could try to automate some kind of cloning process pre-booting, but I’d question whether that would be faster than just booting off the slower medium to begin with.

The ram disc I use allows me to save the contents to Disc before shutdown.

As for booting from it I don't think so!

 

[BURNINGchicken3]

You can buy hyper drive or something similar
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

If you were looking to utilize your PC's ram as a BOOT OS drive then it is very difficult, ram is reinitialized as part of boot process so nothing can be persisted.

More over BIOS has to pass control to an OS after post so you would have to have a bios extension to create ram disk, install OS image using some non-volatile medium and then pass control.

Too complicated!

this is the kind of thing that i was looking for too bad it is $450 and only uses sata2 and ddr2.
i already have a OK ssd i just want 3 seconds windows boot but like said after loading windows into the ram i would be faster to just boot off the ssd.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Why not use a SSD as mentioned above? My i5-2500 with intel 320 SSD boots Windows 7 in under 6 seconds.

 

[Makaveli]

Why not use a SSD as mentioned above? My i5-2500 with intel 320 SSD boots Windows 7 in under 6 seconds.

does that under 6 seconds include the post process?

 

[BURNINGchicken3]

Why not use a SSD as mentioned above? My i5-2500 with intel 320 SSD boots Windows 7 in under 6 seconds.

no way like said is that including or not including post? even not inclueding post that is fast do you have any data on it or just windows?

 

[Nothinman]

no way like said is that including or not including post? even not inclueding post that is fast do you have any data on it or just windows?

A clean Debian install on my home PC with an Intel SSD was probably closer to 3s from finishing POST to GDM being up. It takes a little bit longer now that I've installed a number of software that comes with daemons, but it's still easily under 10s.

Why don't you just use S3 suspend? I do that with my work laptop and it wakes up and is ready to go in 1-3s. And I've still got everything running so it's exactly where I left off.

 

[boochi]

You can install a virtual machine on a ram disk and save it at shutdown. It actually loads and saves pretty fast on a ssd.

 

[Diogenes2]

Any faster than just loading the OS itself from an SSD ?

 

[br0mide]

My hardware RAM drives boot Win7 fast. They are battery backed and survive reboot. I have a couple of these: http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255 and a iRAM.

I was using Intel X-25 M to store backup images, but ran out of space on the ram-drive raid set, so started using it as my boot drive as well. Need more space for Diablo3 and would like to run VM's so I came here looking for fast storage options.

I am tempted to do X79 with 64GB and a software RAM-Drive that saves itself to disk and pre-loads at boot, but I've had a lot of problems with soft ram drives not working with >4GB RAM in the past.

In any case, if all you want is fast boot/availability, I agree with the guy that said sleep/standby.

 

[vol7ron]

Get a SSD, install Win 7 on it, and you effectively have a bootable RAM disk.

No. This is all kinds of wrong.

An SSD is not RAM (random access memory). A RAM disk would be 300-1000% faster than an SSD.

is it possible to boot windows off a ram disk? with out having to re install it each time?

Yes it's possible, if you could have your BIOS recognize your RAM Disk and boot off it (calling the boot loader), but you probably don't want to. In my experience, even when your RAM Disk is configured correctly, I've seen problems. Like, Windows 7 would mount the disk one moment and then it would somehow unmount it and even though backups are stored, it seems not to want to re-load them.

They're fast when they're working, but still finicky and prone to errors. Not to mention, RAM sectors do go bad and using the RAM like a HD just puts that much more stress on those components, as well as the memory bus. - make sure you have decent heatsinks/coolers for your RAM.

Finally, because RAM is volatile, you need some sort of persistent power source so that the RAM doesn't loose the OS/data. br0mide has shown an after-market option, which does mostly everything for you. All-in-all, I feel it's more of a hassle than it's worth. Your better bet is to get a DRAM-SSD [if you can afford it -ha- ]... http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-ram-v-flash.html

 

[BURNINGchicken3]

did some googleing and found this a newer one of these with sataor pci-e is what i am after

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1742/1

and for people wanting to know what is so good about a ram disk here is a crystal disk benchmark http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/7207/98150030.png

 

[hhhd1]

with any of the new 500mb/s SSDs, the cpu is the bottleneck and not the storage, you will not get much faster boot times.

you can get 4x 64gb ssds and put them in raid0.

 

[Magic Carpet]

did some googleing and found this a newer one of these with sataor pci-e is what i am after

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1742/1

I have been running this for about 6 years. No issues, whatsoever. No worries about write cycles, either. No maintenance. Little storage, is about the main drawback. Great, if you're a spy and need to kill DATA fast, though :whiste:

 

[sm625]

I was one of those schmucks who bought Gigabyte's I-RAM back in 2005. It's fun to play with but data does get corrupted eventually.

 

[boochi]

Any faster than just loading the OS itself from an SSD ?

Yes and no. It loads to desktop with antivirus and all other installed items in about 6-8 seconds but you still have to wait for the vm to load to the ram disk and save back before shutting down the host. I just wanted to see if it was possible to have a vm run faster than the host that it was on. In some ways it does, however no vm will be able to use all the power available on your rig as you might running from a straight install. Latency is greatly reduced at the expense of reduced memory bandwidth. For anyone that wants a secure, no files left behind internet box, a vm run from a ram disk that does not save at shutdown can't be beat.

 

[Magic Carpet]

It's fun to play with but data does get corrupted eventually.

What kind of corruption, you have experienced?

 

[rsutoratosu]

I had no problems with my gigabyte iram, i still have them, i had 5 iram but only able to fit 2-3 on each machine.. tight clearance. I eventually sold them off and kept 2 for swap file purposes, all these empty pci slots. the sata 1 limit speed kind sucked, even in raid.. the battery died off but you can buy replacement.