MY STUFF :

Loading Windows entirely from RAM

(Skip this and go directly to starting from scratch)

I first hit upon this idea when i heard that windows NT keeps writing code from kernel and pageable areas of
memory to a pagefile that is resident on the drive.This by the way takes up precious space and causes slight fragmentation (in FAT32 anyway if meagre in NTFS).I just thought why not put the pagefile in memory and I
figured .....if Windows wants to move parts of its code somewhere ,why not move it around there itself and
save us all a lot of precious space and time.

Starting from scratch :

Need to get XMSDISK from somewhere....try here

You need atleast 1GB of memory.....dont worry if you dont the minimum is 512mb

One startup floppy to boot into DOS:\>

DosLFN (for long file name support) dget it here

Unrar for Dos (any utility that can decompress the archive to ramdrive can be used eg. lcopy or xclone or xxcopy)here

XMSDISK configuring: ( and why xmsdsk?)

Get the xmsdisk from somewhere in my site .Type XMSDSK /? to get a list of options available.

Sample is here:
C:\>xmsdsk /?

XMSDSK : adjustable XMS RAMdisk           


- Install driver either in config.sys:
device[high]='path'\xmsdsk.exe [size in KB]
                       default size is 0.
- Reboot your system.
- _OR_ in autoexec.bat:
xmsdsk [size in KB] [drive:] [options]
Options are:  /? - this help
             /y - default to yes
             /u - unload driver
             /t - top of XMS memory
             /c - cluster size in sectors
                  (1 to 64, power of 2)
- Enter 'xmsdsk' to display current RAMdisk size.
- Enter 'xmsdsk <size in KB>' to change RAMdisk size.

Xmsdsk is a free utility that provides the functionality of MS Ramdrive.sys + you can assign a drive letter to the ramdrive and you can assign it start from extended memory.Win98 needs precious conventional memory to load itself initially and later switches to extended memory.When deciding on the size for ramdrive remember to make it sufficient to hold the <Windows> directory and <program Files> directory , a rar or zip file of which you will make later.

Memory Requirements:


The Win98 install in RAM takes up approximately 300mb of memory when installed with the bare minimum-
(Compact Installation).
So you figure out how much of memory you need.
Another 100mb for running a few essential programs and thats it.

Windows NT will need much more because of the memory hogging nature of the NT Kernel.
This is because even when there is more than enough of Memory on your system,the WIndows NT kernel  keeps filling it up with cache of programs that you might run in the near future (something like Prefetch)
and therefore Free Memory is hereby defined as not memory that is not being used but memory that
Windows can find no use for at the moment.Which you will now realize is not a very likely thing.

So I would recommend atleast 1GB of memory for installing WindowsNT from RAM.For Win98 a 512 mb space as ramdrive is needed for us to get anywhere with this.