(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.
Unrar
for Dos (any
utility that can move the archive to ramdrive can be used eg. lcopy or
xclone or xxcopy)here
Subst
Utility (special
utility that allows to bind a directory to a drive letter as a drive.
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.check out what conventional,uma,hma and extended means
here
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.
Startup
Floppy Disk:
Yes
, you need DOS to install xmsdsk and install windows there.
Create a standard startup disk using windows 98 or windows nt...just remember
to enable himem.sys and
emm386.sys in config.sys.
Subst
Utility:
We use the subst.exe utility to create a new drive lets say X: where we
will install the WIN98 .
Syntax
of SUBST: $subst <drive letter> <directory path>
This
allows a transparent drive to be created that appears to the win98 installation
as a new drive .we install win98 on this virtual drive. later on compress
the actual directory binded to the drive thus ending up with a nice and
sweet compressed image of the windows drive itself. Something like the
linux "mount --bind" command.
If
you have got everything go to next page to start install.
