Is it possible to boot windows from a ram disk?

[Austin8868]

I watched this video on youtube where this guy had windows loaded on a ddr2 or ddr3 ram disk (i guess you would call it that) and windows booted in less than 4 seconds and programs opened up instantly. I have not one clue how he did it but would this be possible to do and put all of your everyday programs on it? Like your web browser, media center, and what ever else you use most often, and you put the rest of your programs on a ssd?

 

[SIW2]

Do you have a link to the youtube video?

 

[JasonTodd]

Considering win7 eats up around 36GB of HDD space on a very fresh install without programs.. I highly doubt anyone really did this.. also it's RAM he's supposedly using? Not ROM? So I guess every time he restarts he has to re-install every Prog and his OS? If I belived everything I've seen on Youtube...

Now my SSD boots windows around 25ish seconds and progs open up really fast.. and my system is old. Maybe he has a nice setup, but 4 sec load time... thats sooo 2012

 

[sordid]

Save your SSD: Boot Windows XP from a RamDisk

 

[Austin8868]

YouTube - Insane 8 second Windows XP bootup. Ram Disk

Heres the link

 

[sordid]

Could as well be edited. Hard to tell. To me it appears somewhat odd how the desktop all of a sudden materializes.

 

[JasonTodd]

Save your SSD: Boot Windows XP from a RamDisk

"So as soon as you turn off the power to your PC, all of the data is erased. You need to reload everything from scratch the next time you boot."

Cool idea... yet not fully working. By the time they get this working right.. SSD's will be faster

 

[Austin8868]

Maybe we can get a group together here to try and get it working, then we create a 64gb RD (ram disk) and we all become multi billionaires

 

[Cauthon]

"So as soon as you turn off the power to your PC, all of the data is erased"

If that is the biggest problem, it doesn't sound so bad. It should be easy enough to rearrange the power supply to keep the ram drive on. Or, how about using a USB data traveler or an SD card? My interest is not so much about booting quickly, but keeping away from gradual corruption of Windows until I have to re-install it. I would like to be able to shut down without seeing the message "saving your settings". Remember the good old days when the OS was in ROM? Every day, the OS was the same as the day before etc. I have not used Windows 7; maybe practice has made Microsoft perfect

 

[Zepher]

Considering win7 eats up around 36GB of HDD space on a very fresh install without programs.. I highly doubt anyone really did this.. also it's RAM he's supposedly using? Not ROM? So I guess every time he restarts he has to re-install every Prog and his OS? If I belived everything I've seen on Youtube...

Now my SSD boots windows around 25ish seconds and progs open up really fast.. and my system is old. Maybe he has a nice setup, but 4 sec load time... thats sooo 2012

My Dell Mini 9 Netbook only had an 8GB SSD and I was able to load Windows 7 Professional on it.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there

1) a RAM disk is only "persistent" until the computer is powered off so the RAM disk needs to be initially loaded from some physical device first.

2) The well known Hirens boot cd can be booted from a USB stick.
The "Mini XP" system on it is loaded on to a RAM disk which is then the Windows system drive. Once booted you can remove the USB stick. Windows XP runs from the RAM disk.

3) Since some versions of Hirens boot CD contain proprietary software you'll have to search out links yourself but it does what you need once the system has booted.

Some Linux Live distros work like that too.

cheers
jimbo

 

[Cauthon]

I thought so

"My Dell Mini 9 Netbook only had an 8GB SSD and I was able to load Windows 7 Professional on it"

As noted, I don't speak Windows 7, so I couldn't be sure, but I thought 36GB sounded like a whole lot for any operating system. Aside from anything else, how would they distribute it, since that is bigger than any convenient portable memory? We would be back to the days of a handful of floppy discs, but now it would be a handful of DVD's:-(