WinVBlock is a free and open source Windows driver for using virtual disks. These disks appear in the Device Manager and Disk Management. It was originally derived from
WinAoE, courtesy of V.
Currently supported are:
- RAM disks
- Supported for booting from
- MEMDISK-established
- Floppies
- Hard disks
- Optical discs
- GRUB4DOS-established
- Floppies
- Hard disks
- Optical discs
- File-backed disks
- Using the winvblk.exe command
- Floppies
- Hard disks
- Supported for booting from via GRUB4DOS mapping
- Optical discs
- Supported for booting from via GRUB4DOS mapping
- AoE disks
- Supported for booting from as established by gPXE or another SAN-booting mechanism, or
- Using the winvblk.exe command
- Hard disks
You'll find the WinVBlock and AoE drivers attached to
my most recent post.
Source code should be available at
the Etherboot & gPXE projects, courtesy of their project leader, Marty Connor.
Work on this driver was and is prompted by the discussion found in this thread.
See also:
FiraDisk by karyonix. Fine work.
Examples:
Using PXELINUX and the MEMDISK included in the .ZIP file to create a hard disk in RAMDirectory layout:
/tftpboot/
/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/
/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default
/tftpboot/memdisk
/tftpboot/RamXP.HDD
/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default file:
DEFAULT ramxp
LABEL ramxp
KERNEL memdisk
APPEND raw
INITRD RamXP.HDD
SYSLINUX, EXTLINUX, and ISOLINUX config-files could be the same as aboveUsing GRUB4DOS to create a hard disk in RAMDirectory layout:
/menu.lst
/RamXP.HDD
MENU.LST file:
default 0
title RamXP
map --mem (hd0,0)/RamXP.HDD (hd0)
map --hook
root (hd0,0)
chainloader /ntldr
Using WinVBlock in a Windows XP/2003 PE environment (such as BartPE)Make sure you include:
- \I386\System32\Drivers\WVBlk32.SYS (or WVBlk64.SYS)
Make sure
TXTSETUP.SIF includes:
...
[SCSI.Load]
wvblk32 = wvblk32.sys,4
...
---ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS---I swear that I read something about this before, but I am really lame with searching Boot Land. Way, way, too many posts to sort through and never find what I'm looking for. Then again, maybe it's because I never really read it.
![;)]()
I guess I'll have to search on searching to find out what I'm doing incorrectly.
Anyway, yeah: Has anyone experimented with establishing a RAM disk from GRUB4DOS, booting that RAM disk to some flavour of XP (full/"PE") and having
any version of RAMDISK.SYS pick up the GRUB4DOS-established RAM disk and provide it as the boot volume, thus avoiding our favourite friend STOP 0x...7B?
FYI, I'd
really like to start working on an XP driver with just such support, but have to balance the time investment out with some practicality, meaning testing such equivalent functionality, if it already exists in another form.
I don't mean with ramdisk(0) and /rdpath= entries, thanks.
As an aside, there appears to be a blend of .SDI users and others, but I find a plain partition image to be way easier.
Some other "words" for future searchers:
map --mem blah
map blah (rd)
RAMDISK.SYS
Unmountable Boot Volume Prevention
- Sha0 Miller