Tools and utilities for Windows

Tools and utilities for Windows

Some of my programs listed here are written many years ago and some are new, but most of them are now recompiled with MSVC++ optimizing compiler. Source code for the utilities and many other small test applications are available here as a 7-zip archive, www.7-zip.org.

This page contains software 5 star rated by Brothersoft.

You can use and redistribute the utilities and source code as you like, but remember to link back to this site or my e-mail adress and always attach any following text file when you redistribute the utilities. A big ZIP file with compiled exe-files for all utilities listed here and some more is available here (554 KB) or in 7-zip format here (250 KB).

Most of the programs here are compressed into ZIP files. ZIP files can be uncompressed in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 but earlier versions of Windows require a third-party ZIP tool, like the shareware PKZip, WinZip or the freeware 7-zip or a free console tool like the GNU version of unzip.exe.

Please note! The applications are not tested in all possible environments. The author shall not be held responsible for what the applications actually do when they are used. If you have any ideas or modifications of source code you would like to share, please send me an e-mail. The tools published here are free with a very flexible open license. It is for example no problem to include any of the tools in a commercial product, as long as copyright information specifies that parts of the software belongs to me with some kind of reference, such as a web link, to http://www.ltr-data.se or this page. You do not have to make the source code available to your customers.

On this page

Links to other projects
History of updates of this page
ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver
Zero and Random Device Driver
Small command line utilities
Small utilities with graphical user interface
.NET applications

Do you want tips and advice for programming projects or need a C/C++ or Visual Basic programmer? Do you want tips and advice how to optimize and simplify administration of computers and networks? Have some kind of hard-to-solve problem with computers, networks, drivers, applications etc? Maybe I can help you. Send me an e-mail: olof@ltr-data.se or call me at +46 70 345 89 52. (I speak Swedish, English, Danish and Norwegian.)

Links to other projects

Many useful ports of GNU utilities to Win32 by Karl M Syring are available at UnxUtils sourceforge site.

Many useful open source Windows NT driver projects by Bo Brantén.

Other useful tools and interesting source code using undocumented native API:s and an Ext2 filesystem for NT project by Adrey Shedel.

Also got an e-mail from Boris Guzner who has a Registry Editor called RegMagik.

History of updates of this page

Update 18 Sept 2004

Added a new utility called fdf, "find duplicate files".
Also corrected OEM codepage display of filenames on the console for many of my console based tools.
Rebuilt some other programs due to minor corrections in my libraries.

Update 28 Sept 2004

Fixed some bugs in fdf. Rebuilt joindomain with updated unicode CRT library.
Changed free space and total space report in sizdir32 and it now also displays used percentage of total space and displays statistics for the correct volume when the current directory is under a junction point.
Added fileinfo to this list.

Update 2 Dec 2004

Added link to RegMagik above
Added a port of bzip2 optimized for Pentium 4 processors.
Added a new utility called logonwrap used to run an application and automatically log off the user session when that applicaiton terminates.
Also added some new features to fdf and fileinfo.

Update 21 Jan 2005

Fixed some minor bugs in different applications and libraries, especially one in the CRT library that caused Unicode applications to crash on Win 9x/ME platforms.
One of my archive/backup tools from the old Windows NT 3.51/4.0 days is now released on this page as open source under the name strarc, "Stream Archiver". This will replace the old xcopynt which was unable to completely backup all meta data on NTFS volumes. I now stop development except bugfixes for xcopynt and recommend all users of xcopynt to use strarc instead.
Added some new features to fdf.
Added a small tool called junc that is used to manage junction points. This one creates junctions to native paths, such as \Device\Floppy0\ or \??\C:\Directory and may therefore be used to create junctions to volumes or directories not available through a drive letter under Win32.
Added a small tool called psmod to this list.

Update 25 Jan 2005

Fixed some bugs in the CRT library and rebuilt most of the files here.
Release 0.0.7 of strarc with lots of new features and a strarc.txt with usage description and how-tos.

Update 18 Mar 2005

Fixed a bug in the CRT library that could cause exception when no command line parameters were sent from some shells. Rebuilt most of the files here.
Release 0.1.1b of strarc with some new features.
Finally got some time to rebuild the old regrepl and fsplitw tools so that they linked with my CRT library. The size of regrepl.exe is now 15 360 bytes instead of 396 288 bytes as it was with the old Borland CRT. I added some new features to regrepl too, like connecting to remote computers and selecting subkeys.
Added enumproto and enumps.

Update 10 Apr 2005

Release 0.1.2 of strarc with some new features, e.g. an extract option that only freshening existing files.
Added winlogoncfg.

Update 19 Apr 2005

Release 0.1.2b of strarc. I have received reports about an error in strarc that causes hard links not to be restored in some directories and I have only been able to reproduce the error on Windows NT 4.0. I have changed the restore code so that the hard link restore code now uses the NtSetInformationFile() API directly and does not use BackupWrite() API at all and that seems to have corrected the error. I also made a correction so that an error message is displayed when hard links cannot be restored and files are copied instead, unless of course hard link restore is disabled by command line parameters.

Minor update 11 May 2005

Found and fixed a small memory leak in strarc and fdf when the utilities created new hard links to files.
Rewrote some CRT stuff and rebuilt some of the programs. The change made some of the exe files smaller and in other ways more optimized, nothing else.
Added some new switches to the movent tool.
Added some better error reporting in logonwrap.

Minor update 15 May 2005

Fixed a problem in strarc. The problem occured when restoring hard links to files with read-only attribute set.

Minor update 21 May 2005

Added a new feature to fdf. It is now possible to skip certain bytes at the beginning of each file when comparing their contents. This is good if you e.g. want to search your mp3 archive and find similar files where only the header is different.
Rebuilt some "Windows NT only" tools as fixed (non-relocateable) exe files. This saved some file size.

Update 1 Mar 2006

Added a new section called Device driver projects on this page. Here I will publish the open-source driver projects I am working on.
Introducing a new device driver project called ImDisk. This is basically a virtual disk driver for Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003 that can use disk files, virtual memory or a device on another computer on the network to emulate disk drives. It is even possible to boot a machine with NTFS partitions using a Unix Live-CD and use the included devio tool to let ImDisk on another computer running Windows on the network mount the NTFS partition on the machine you booted with the Unix Live-CD. This way you can recover information and even run chkdsk on drives on machines where Windows does not boot.
Fixed an issue with fdf. Previously when the -c switch were used to split links, fdf did not check if two links found actually were the same link which could cause it to delete the last link to the file. This happened when the -j switch was not used and the same link was found following two paths where one included a junction point that pointed to the other path. When following the directory trees fdf did not check if the two paths followed actually were the same. With this fix, fdf no longer deletes the last link to a file when running with the -c switch.
Release 0.1.3 of strarc. With the new switch -r is now possible to include the registry database files of a running Windows system in a backup. This makes it much easier to create a complete backup of a running system. For more information read the strarc.txt file in the zip file. The default buffer size is now changed from 512 KB to 2 MB. After some benchmark tests I have realized that 512 KB was not an optimal size for speed, but of course for memory usage. It is still possible to specify on the command line a smaller or bigger buffer size than the default.
Added a new device driver called Zero And Random Device Driver. It creates two device objects called \\.\zero and \\.\random that works like /dev/zreo and /dev/random in *nix environments. This makes it possible to create a file filled with zeros using dd, example: dd if=\\.\zero of=zerofile count=2880.
Added some new features to devioctl. It is now possible to query disk geometry and partition length information.
Added a new checkbox in winlogoncfg. It is now possible to enable/disable the requirement of pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete to logon to Windows.
Rewrote some CRT stuff again and rebuilt most of the programs. The change made many of the larger exe files smaller and some of the smaller files got slightly bigger but in many other ways more optimized for speed and memory usage. I also corrected the way Windows error messages are displayed in console applications so that line breaks now works correctly.

Minor update 2 Mar 2006

Fixed an error in my CRT that caused error messages with file names to be displayed with the wrong character set for the file name but the correct one for the error message string. At least it is now consequent after this fix...

Minor update 5 Mar 2006

Added some new features to txtcnv32. It is now possible to specify codepages to convert from and to, or to convert from or to 16-bit Unicode from or to a specific codepage.

Minor update 7 Mar 2006

Still some problems with displaying error messages with correct line breaks etc. Seem to be fixed now.

Serious bugfix 8 Mar 2006

Revision 0.1.3a of strarc. Fixed a problem when restoring over existing files with more than one hard link. The bug caused existing file to be truncated to zero bytes. Update your strarc.exe to the latest version before restoring over existing files with more than one hard link.

Minor update 10 Mar 2006

Small change of the install routine for the Zero And Random Device Driver. The driver will now load automatically when install is finished.

Minor update 27 Apr 2006

Fixed a problem with popdump that caused it to not receive messages from some servers. Thanks to Joseph Brown for notifying me about this bug.

Minor update 18 Jun 2006

Fixed several broken links on this page.

Minor update 26 Jun 2006

Revision 0.1.3b of strarc. Changed the file listing with the -l switch to not attempt to break lines at spaces in paths. The reason to this change is to make it possible to write the backup listing to a log file without having the paths modified for console display.

Minor update 27 Jun 2006

Revision 0.1.3c of strarc. Corrected a mistake from yesterday. Extended characters were not displayed correctly in file listings (converted to OEM charset twice).

Minor update 29 Jun 2006

Corrected the link to dosdev.zip in the list below.

Minor update 21 Sept 2006

Fixed a problem with ImDisk. The command line tool imdisk.exe did not accept the cd parameter to the -o option.

Minor update 21 Nov 2006

Changed sizdir32.exe so that the summary now includes total used, total free and per cent used and free.

Minor update 23 Nov 2006

Fixed a problem with ImDisk. The command line tool imdisk.exe had a misleading helptext telling that a b suffix to virtual disk sizes meant bytes and that sizes without suffixes meant number of 512-byte blocks. Actually, the b suffix was not accepted and sizes without a suffix was taken as bytes. Now, added a b suffix that takes the size as number of 512-byte blocks. Without suffix still means bytes. Also corrected and updated the help text to reflect this.

Minor update 1 Dec 2006

Fixed a problem with ImDisk. The command line tool imdisk.exe did not accept multiple options separated by commas as the documentation stated. This is now corrected.

Minor update 13 Dec 2006

Fixed a problem with ImDisk. Write permission was required for the image file unless the -o command line option specified ro for a read-only virtual disk. This was true even for virtual CD-ROM drives even though they are always read-only and never make any use of the write permission for the image file. This is now corrected so that only read permission for the image file is required to create virtual CD-ROM drives.

Minor update 4 Feb 2007

Modified the way ImDisk emulates multi-session CD/DVD. Images of multi-session CD/DVD were not handled correctly which confused some UDF filesystem drivers which made it very difficult to read for example the WDK images from Microsoft with some UDF filesystem drivers installed. This seems to be fixed with this modification. Thanks very much to Federico Bianchi for notifying me about this problem.

Minor update 11 Mar 2007

Fixed a bug in the ImDisk driver. If the system would run out of kernel pool memory during driver initialization in combination with registry settings for creating virtual drives while the driver was loaded, it could attempt to free other drivers memory and possibly blue screen. Also rebuilt ImDisk with the new Windows Driver Kit (WDK).

Minor update 14 Mar 2007

Fixed the ImDisk install package. The old .inf file seem to have been packed with the new version from 11 march (incompatible). Should be fixed now.

Fixed a problem with strarc. If a file read operation fails during a backup job, the restore routine could get confused about the data stream and not restoring any files until the size of the failed file was streamed to it, which means that it could skip retoring files under these circumstances. The behaviour of the restore routine is now changed so that if a file restore fails it immediately returns to scanning the stream for new file headers, which should solve most of these problems.

Update 17 Mar 2007

Serveral fixes and changes in ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
There have been some issues with using subdirectories as mount points for virtual drives, for example related to file listing etc. That should be fixed now.
On most Windows NT 3.51 or 4.0 systems it has not been possible to dismount virtual CD/DVD-ROM drives. Even though there still seem to be some problems, especially in combination with some filesystem drivers, it now seem to work at least in most cases.
The behaviour of the driver is now changed so that it keeps information about associated drive letter even on Windows NT 3.51 or 4.0. This was changed mainly because it simplified the development of GUI control tools.
Developed a small Control Panel applet for controlling the ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. The default install package installs it and adds an ImDisk icon to the Control Panel. The applet can be used for the basic tasks with ImDisk, mounting/dismounting virtual disks, but it does not have the full functionality the command line interface has.
Also fixed a problem in the devioctl tool so that it now can eject CD/DVD-ROM drives in Windows NT 3.51 or NT 4.0.

Update 19 Mar 2007

Added a new tool called geteltorito. More information at the link to geteltorito.zip below.

Update 14 Apr 2007

Release of version 1.0.1 of ImDisk. Corrected the driver so that the auto-selection of device type never overrides the device type selected manually on the command line (like it should have worked). Also updated the format the user interface applications and the driver use to send information about the virtual device geometry and volume length so that the volume length (from existing file size or specified by user) is always preserved and the number of cylinders rounded down if necessary. This was only a problem when mounting a volume that was meant to be later written out as a physical partition and the virtual geometry has to be equal to that of the future physical volume when filesystem is created or checked.

Update 23 Apr 2007

Release of version 1.0.2 of ImDisk. This version includes some new features and small fixes. Formatting FAT/FAT32 on Windows 2000 now works again. Faster TCP/IP forwarded I/O through a modified helper service. Removable and hot-plug device properties with the -o rem switch. Better handling of removal of devices where I/O to underlying device have failed. It is now possible to extend the size of mounted virtual disks with the new -e switch. First free drive letter is now automatically suggested in the "Mount new virtual disk" dialog box. When removing virtual disks it is now possible to force dismounting of the filesystem if it cannot be gracefully dismounted. A right-click menu item for mounting files as a virtual disks is now added for Windows Explorer file objects.
Also added some new features to the devioctl tool. It can now be used to extend the size of partitions and filesystems and also display more detailed geometry and size information about disk drives.
Adjusted the default I/O buffer size in strarc. Should be more cache-effective and reasonal now.

Minor update 24 Apr 2007

Updated strarc so that it now correctly restores the sparse file attribute (unless the -s:c option is specified).
Small fixes to ImDisk, mainly to the install routine. It now adds two context menu items for file objects in Windows Explorer, one for read-only and one for read/write mounting and it adds one menu item for drive objects to unmount them.

Minor update 11 May 2007

I have tried to clarify the license for ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver and there is now a discussion forum about ImDisk and other tools here on the boot-land forum. More about that in the section about ImDisk below.
It is now possible to use the first unused drive letter even when mounting virtual disks from the command line with ImDisk. Specify #: as drive letter for this to work.
Changed the behaviour of the context menu items in Windows Explorer. There is now only one menu item and that one brings up the "create new virtual disk" dialog before doing anything. This way I hope to reduce the risk of mounting files as a virtual disks by mistake as that could be dangerous and lead to destoryed contents of mounted files.

Minor update 12 May 2007

Fixed a command line parsing bug in the imdisk.exe command line tool for ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Any string was accepted as a device number with the -u parameter and in case it was not a number it was translated to zero. This was confusing and misleading and is now corrected so that only numbers are accepted with the -u parameter.
Changed enumwinw.exe (the graphical tool for finding and manipulating windows) so that it now uses ShowWindowAsync() instead of ShowWindow() when showing or hiding windows. This fixes the problem that caused enumwinw.exe to hang when trying to show/hide a window that belonged to a hung application.

Update 16 May 2007

Release of version 1.0.3 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. The following are some of the new features and changes.
Corrected auto-selection of geometry so that sector size of 512 bytes is selected for virtual hd and fd and 2048 for virtual cd. It is still possible to manually override the default settings using the -S parameter on the command line.
The buttons in the Control Panel applet have been re-ordered and the 'Done' button is renamed to 'Close'.
Corrected some very difficult-to-understand or just mistyped texts in the help text displayed when imdisk.exe is run without parameters (or when incompatible or bad syntax is used).
All numeric parameters to imdisk.exe are now checked so that they are really numeric. Earlier it was possible, although confusing, to type for example imdisk -d -u F:. Because -u takes a device number as parameter it translated F: into a number and because F: is not a number it got zero and removed device number zero even if that was not actually F:. There was a risk that users removed the wrong device in such cases.
It is now possible to extend the size of RAM-disks too. However note that the resizing of RAM-disks may take a long time because the driver needs to allocate a new block of memory with the new size, copy the contents of the old memory block to the new one and then release the old block. This means that RAM and CPU usage may be very high during the resize operation.
The behaviour when creating a RAM-disk pre-loaded with an image file has changed so that the loading of the image file into the RAM-disk memory block is done after control has returned to the caller but before the driver actually starts service I/O requests for the virtual disk. This means that when a RAM-disk with pre-loaded image file is created from for example a batch file the batch file does no longer hang waiting for the RAM-disk to be completely loaded with the image file.
It is now possible to format virtual disks directly from the Control Panel applet.
When a new virtual disk is created using the command line tool imdisk.exe it is now possible to have the newly created virtual disk automatically formatted. This is implemented by imdisk.exe calling format.com after virtual disk creation. The new -p command line option is used for specifying additional parameters to the format.com command line, such as switches for specifying filesystem, volume label etc. Type imdisk.exe without parameters for more information about this new option.
Support has been added for mounting image files and specifying offset where the disk partition image begins within the image file. The new -b command line option is used for this.
It is now possible to double-click on a virtual disk in the list in the Control Panel applet to open the virtual disk root folder in a Windows Explorer window.
It is now possible to specify a per cent sign % as a suffix to the size parameter, -s on the command line. It means percentage of free physical memory which could be useful when creating RAM-disks. For example -s 20% creates a RAM-disk of 20 per cents of the size of currently free physical memory. (Note that you will need double per cent signs if you are using this syntax in a batch file.)
A refresh command has been added to the Control Panel applet. While the list of current virtual disks has keyboard focus it is now possible to press F5 to refresh the list. This is useful when virtual disks are added or removed from the command line or directly from Windows Explorer while the Control Panel applet is open.
Corrected and added virtual disk geometries for some old floppy sizes.
Added a new item to the context menu that is displayed when right-clicking a drive in Windows Explorer. The new menu is used to save the contents of a disk as an image file.
Most of the these changes come from ideas discussed at forums at boot-land forum. If you have any ideas you would like to share you are welcome to discuss the development of my open source tools there.

Minor update 25 May 2007

Added support for a couple of more floppy disk sizes to ImDisk.
Fixed the character set used for file name reporting in the fileinfo tool.

Minor update 29 May 2007

Fixed a problem with ImDisk. When the menu item "Save disk contents as image file" on a drive icon in Windows Explorer was selected on a drive that was in use a message box was displayed asking wether or not to continue without dismounting the volume. The operation continued even if "Cancel" was selected in the message box. That is now corrected.

Minor update 3 Jun 2007

Added a "Filesystem" column to the virtual disk list in the ImDisk Control Panel applet.
Corrected an error in the ImDisk command line tool imdisk.exe. If the -p parameter was used with a virtual disk without a drive letter the program crashed. It now displays a message telling that a drive letter is required for the -p parameter to work.

Update 13 Jun 2007

Some changes have been made to ImDisk. It is now possible to set or reset the removeable and read-only media characteristics of an existing virtual disk. This means for example that a virtual memory backed virtual disk now can be made read-only without first saving an image of it and re-mount that image read-only. I/O delays to virtual memory backed virtual disks has been removed so the write performance should be much better now.

Minor update 8 Jul 2007

Some minor changes to ImDisk. The window style for the Control Panel applet has been changed so that it shows up on the taskbar and can be minimized as well. The image size visualization for some common floppy sizes are now changed in the Control Panel applet to the more commonly used "thousands of KB". This is done for the floppy sizes 2,880 KB, 1,722 KB, 1,680 KB, 1,440 KB and 1,200 KB.

Minor update 13 Jul 2007

Two buffer-overrun bugs found and fixed in ImDisk. Special thanks to Sebastian Gottschalk for code reviewing.

Minor update 19 Jul 2007

Two errors in buffer-checking code found, one in ImDisk and the other in Zero and Random Device Driver. I recommend all users to install the latest versions as these bugs under some circumstances can blue-screen the system. Thanks again to Sebastian Gottschalk for code reviewing.

Minor update 6 Sept 2007

Minor layout changes to the "Mount new" dialog box in ImDisk Control Panel Applet.

Minor update 16 Okt 2007

Fixed an error in the ImDisk Control Panel Applet. The unit selection radio buttons for offset in image files did not work correctly.
Added broadcasting of WM_DEVICECHANGE messages when devices are about to be removed as an attempt to resolve this issue: TortoiseSVN incompatibility issue

Minor update 18 Nov 2007

Changed the icons in the Control Panel applet and added a context menu. It is now possible to right-click on a device in the list and get a menu with commands for that device.

Minor update 4 Feb 2008

Corrected some texts in ImDisk components, for example some typos and errors in messages and source code comments.

Minor update 15 Feb 2008

New ImDisk feature. It is now possible to type a negative size value on the command line when creating a virtual disk. This means that the size of the virtual disk will be the amount of free physical memory minus this value. This is useful when creating large RAM-disks where the size should depend on the amount of free memory.

Minor update 28 May 2008

Changed the ImDisk install script so that a fixed estimated size is used by the Add/Remove Program Control Panel applet. This should fix the problem with Windows 2000 calculating the entire size of the system32 as the size of ImDisk. Thanks to Stefan Kanthak for notifying me about this and for suggesting a fix.

Minor update 7 Aug 2008

Correction to the sector size in the geteltorito tool. The extracted boot images were always four times larger than expected. Thanks to Jose Acevedo for notifying me about this and for suggesting a fix.

Minor update 4 Nov 2008

Release 1.0.4 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Added an option to force removal of ImDisk virtual disks from command line even when devices are in use. Use a capital letter 'D' in the delete switch to imdisk.exe to use this option, for example: imdisk -D -m R:

Minor update 18 Nov 2008

Updated error reporting in strarc so that the name of any directory that cannot be created or changed to is displayed in the error output. This could be useful for example when error output from many strarc runs are appended to the same error log file. The new version is 0.1.4a.

Update 23 Nov 2008

Release 1.1.0 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. The user interface now supports auto-selecting values for offset and size by reading partition table in raw hard disk images. This makes it a lot easier to mount a partition within a hard disk image file. For the command line tool a new switch -v has been added used to select which partition to mount. The user interface also support auto-selecting offset when mounting Nero .nrg and Microsoft .sdi image files. With the command line tool imdisk.exe the switch -b with parameter auto is used for this.

Minor update 25 Nov 2008

Release 1.1.1 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. The driver now automatically detects .iso, .nrg and .bin files as CD/DVD images.

Minor update 2 Dec 2008

Release 1.1.2 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Corrected some problems with the auto-detection of master boot records in image files and added a new feature where the driver sets a flag when a virtual disk has been written to. This flag can be cleared with the imdisk -e -o saved command and is shown for example with imdisk -l -m R: or similar. This should make it possible to script a solution where a RAM disk could be saved to an image file if it has been modified. Thanks to "Zero3K" for suggesting this feature.

Update 5 Dec 2008

Release 1.1.3 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Corrected one additional problem with the auto-detection of master boot records in image files. Corrected a serious problem with proxy-type virtual disks where a malformed I/O message from the proxy server could cause blue-screens in some cases. The install package now also includes binaries for 64-bit AMD and Intel architectures.
The server-end program for ImDisk in proxy-mode, devio.exe has been updated. Auto-detection of file sizes now works under both Windows and *nix and it also supports auto-detection of master boot records and selecting parameters for a partition read from the master boot record. Support has also been added for dynamically expanding Microsoft .vhd files used with Virtual PC and Virtual Server. Fixed size .vhd files have been possible to mount directly with ImDisk before but this adds support for dynamically expanding .vhd files via devio.exe as a I/O proxy. The tool devio.exe is a command line tool and can be downloaded here (Windows version) or here (FreeBSD version).

Update 27 Jan 2009

Release 1.2.0 of rawcopy. There is now a -s switch that creates output files as sparse files.

Minor update 28 Jan 2009

Release 1.2.1 of rawcopy. The behaviour when -s switch is used has changed. It now skips writing blocks containing all zeroes and instead just moves the file pointer forward.

Update 21 Apr 2009

Release 1.1.4 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Automatic partition recognition was not successful with other sector size than 512 bytes. This is now fixed.

Update 23 Nov 2009

Release 1.1.5 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Corrected a few things regarding creating and removing drive letters. Sometimes drive letters were not successfully removed when non-privileged users unmounted a virtual disk. This seems to be fixed now. Also corrected shell notifications when drives are mounted and dismounted so that applications get correct notifications. Earlier, for example, notifications where sent out for drive letter X when drive Y was created or removed. A confirmation dialog has also been added where user has to confirm mounting a virtual disk over a drive letter that is already in use.

Update 7 Dec 2009

Release 1.1.6 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
Added further support for dismounting virtual disks without administrative privileges. Previously ordinary users could not force dismount of "fixed" virtual hard disks. This has now been changed so that any user can force a dismount.
Changed the routine that removes virtual disks so that in case of RAM disks the drive letter and used memory are freed first before it waits for handles to close and actually removes the device object. This means that RAM can now be freed immediately when a RAM disk is deleted even if the device cannot be immediately removed.
Changed rawcopy so that parameters accept K, M and G suffixes for kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes.
Added 64-bit versions of regrepl, strarc and winlogoncfg for better compatibility with 64-bit versions of Windows.

Minor update 10 Dec 2009

64-bit versions of Zero and Random Device Driver now uses a new faster kernel API for generating random characters.

Update 23 Dec 2009

Release 1.2.3 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
The driver now supports 64 virtual drives instead of 32.
ImDisk virtual disks can now hold Windows swapfiles. Useful if you want to create a swapfile on a diskless (RAM-booted) machine, or if you want to create a swapfile on a network drive.
Security change. On Windows XP and later, file permissions are now checked so that user mounting a new virtual disk actually has requested access to the image file to mount. If user does not have access to the image file, the device creation operation is denied by the driver and is reported as an "Access denied" error message to the user. On Windows 2000 and earlier the driver works like in previous versions, that is, without any access checks.
Security fix. There was a privilege check missing in a callback that the helper service uses to callback into the driver when a proxy connection has been established and is ready to be used by the driver. Without this privilege check there is a backdoor into privileged kernel space. This has now been fixed.

Minor update 16 Feb 2010

Modified sizdir32.exe so that it now displays correct allocation size for sparse files as well as compressed files.

Update 18 Feb 2010

ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver and Zero and Random Device Driver 64 bit drivers are now digitally signed with a certificate trusted by Microsoft. This means that they now work on 64 bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 without Windows running in testsigning mode.

Update 25 Feb 2010

Release 1.2.4 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. When registry settings where setup for the driver to auto-create a virtual disk when driver is loaded, specified drive letter was not assigned for the device. This has now been corrected.

Update 2 March 2010

Release 1.2.5 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Registry settings for auto-creating a virtual memory backed virtual disk pre-loaded with an image file did not work without setting disk size explicitly on 64 bit versions. This has now been corrected to work as expected, that is, disk size is automatically detected from image file size like in 32 bit version.

Update 5 March 2010

Release 1.2.6 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. When contents of a disk volume is saved as an image file from Control Panel applet or using Explorer context menu option it is now ensured that the resultning image file has the same size as the saved disk volume. This means that even if the underlying filesystem driver does not return all data at the end of the disk volume the image file will still be padded and filled up to the matching size so that everything works correctly when the image file is later mounted as a virtual disk.

Update 6 March 2010

Release 1.2.7 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. A correction was made to the routine that saves disk contents as an image file. Thanks to "TheK" for suggesting this fix.

Update 9 March 2010

Release 1.2.8 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Further corrections to the routine that saves disk contents as an image file. Buffer sizes are now adjusted to make sure that the complete disk contents are saved.
New features to rawcopy. Including unbuffered I/O and direct DASD I/O.

All file dates are in ISO date format, YYYY-MM-DD. This makes the list easier to sort.

ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver - Latest version 1.2.8 built 9 March 2010

ImDisk is a virtual disk driver for Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008. It can create virtual hard disk, floppy or CD/DVD drives using image files or system memory. The install package installs a console-mode control program called imdisk.exe and a Control Panel applet. After install is finished, type imdisk without parameters for syntax help or double click the ImDisk icon in the Control Panel. It also adds a menu item in Windows Explorer so that you can right-click on a file to mount it as a virtual disk drive. Users of mdconfig in FreeBSD will probably be familiar with the command line syntax of imdisk.exe. The driver, service and control program can be uninstalled using the Add/Remove programs applet in the Control Panel. No reboot is required for installing or uninstalling.

The install package also contains a user-mode helper service that enables the virtual disk driver to forward I/O requests to other computers on the network. This makes it possible to boot a machine with NTFS partitions with a *nix Live-CD and use the included devio tool to let ImDisk on another computer running Windows on the network mount the NTFS partition on the machine you booted with the *nix Live-CD. This way you can recover information and even run chkdsk on drives on machines where Windows does not boot. I am working on a Live CD image with devio and other useful things for this pre-loaded. There are also instructions about how to use devio under Windows on Claus Valca's blog.

Download screenshot - 43.5 KB
Download the install package - 283 KB, works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.

About the install package
The install package is created using 7-zip sfx stubs and includes an .inf install script. No reboot is required after installing or uninstalling. The install package works on Windows NT 3.51/NT 4.0/2000/XP/Server 2003/Vista/Server 2008, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Special note for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7
On Vista and Server 2008 you need to either turn off UAC, User Access Control, or setup the driver to auto-load on system startup. Setting the driver to auto-start is recommended.

About turning off UAC: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2006/09/20/763275.aspx
-- or --
Set the ImDisk driver to auto-load at Command Prompt: sc config imdisk start= auto
or set the ImDisk driver to auto-load using GUI: Open Device Manager, View -> Show hidden devices. Under "Non-plug-and-play devices" right-click ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver and select properties. On the "Driver" tab, change start type to Automatic.

Using either solution it should work after next reboot.

64-bit versions share source code with the 32-bit version. All features and most limitations are the same in the 64-bit and 32-bit versions. One notable difference however is that the 64-bit versions do not have any practical size limits for RAM disks.

64 bit drivers are now digitally signed with a certificate trusted by Microsoft.
This means that ImDisk now works Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 even without running it testsigning mode.

Special note for Windows NT 3.51
The .inf file used in the install process is not compatible with Windows NT 3.51. To install on NT 3.51 you can extract the files in the packages using 7-zip and then manually create the driver keys in the registry or using a SCM control tool like sc.exe in the Windows NT Resource Kit. On later versions of Windows you just run the package and it will install everything automatically.

Source code
Source code for all of ImDisk, including a server-part for *nix like systems, is available as a 7-zip compressed file here (94 KB). The Windows parts of the source code can be built in the Windows 2000 build environemt in the latest WDK and the *nix parts can be built with gcc. If you want to call functions for creating/removing/querying virtual disks from your own program you can #include the file inc\imdisk.h in your C/C++ source files and link the cpl\i386\imdisk.lib library. If you would like information about how to write compatible server-end software you can take a look at the I/O packet structures in inc\imdproxy.h.

License
I have received some e-mails with questions wether or not it is okay to include this driver in a commercial product. The answer is yes, just like all other tools I publish here. However, note that a few lines of code are under the GNU GPL license, this is basically the parts related to floppy emulation. Some of the driver code is also ported to Windows NT from the FreeBSD 'md' driver.

Forum
A new sub-forum has been started at the boot-land forum. This new sub-forum is for discussions about ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver and other tools published here.

Zero and Random device driver - updated 10 Dec 2009 (signed 18 Feb 2010)

The Zero and Random device driver creates two device objects, \Device\Zero and \Device\Random and a symbolic link to each of these under \DosDevices so that they are reachable from Win32 applications using the syntax \\.\zero and \\.\random. The devices work like /dev/zero and /dev/random in *nix like environments. Zero produces zero characters and Random produces random characters in the read buffers. When written to both of the device objects act like a Null device, that is just accepting and ignoring the data in the write buffer. The drivers can e.g. be used with the classic dd tool or with my rawcopy tool to fill files, devices etc with zero or random characters, e.g. to wipe out the contents of a hard drive.

The install package installs the driver and loads it into the kernel and setup for automatical load when Windows starts up. The driver can be uninstalled using Add/Remove programs applet in the Control Panel.

Download the install package - 104 KB. Works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.

Small command line utilities

Works on Windows NT/95/98/ME/2000/XP/2003 unless the description says something else. Some of them also run on Windows 3.x with Win32s but then without displaying anything because Win32s on Windows 3.x has no console support.

These binaries are compiled with the free version of Microsoft Visual C++. They are not linked with the standard C or C++ libraries that comes with this compiler, instead they are linked with a dynamic library I call minwcrt (Minimal Windows C Run-Time Library) linking them to crtdll.dll instead of msvcrt.dll. This makes them run in all versions of Win32 without additional dll files. This is also the reason why the exe files are very small. Source for this library is available as part of the source archive mentioned in the top of this document.

bzip2.zip - 29.5 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - The very space efficient bzip2 compression utility with huffman/deflate algorithms. This port is from the XMILL project. The binary here is optimized for Pentium 4 processors but will run on other x86 processors as well and is linked with the minwcrt library so the exe file is smaller and does not require msvcrt.dll like K.M. Syring's port of the GNU version does.
calldll.zip - 2.40 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Calls a function in a dll file. The function must use the stdcall calling convention and accept only one single parameter, a pointer to a character string as or a NULL pointer. If you e.g. want to connect to a network printer from a batch file you can write: "calldll winspool.drv AddPrinterConnectionA \\server\printerq". The ZIP file also contains calldllw.exe which is exactly the same except that it passes a unicode string instead of ansi. That version can only be used in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003.
chsize32.zip - 2.17 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Changes file size of existing file or creates a new file with specified size.
copyacls.zip - 1.79 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Copies access lists (permissions and ownership) from one file or directory to a list of others.
cut.zip - 6.02 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - My Win32 port of the BSD cut utility. This version is a mutch smaller exe file than e.g. K M Syring's Win32 port of the GNU cut utility. Additionally, because this version does not require msvcrt.dll it will run without additional files even on very old versions of Windows NT.
devioctl.zip - 4.33 KB - compiled 2007-04-23 - Command line interface to the basic disk device functions of DeviceIoControl() API. Used to unmount a filesystem, load or eject e.g. a CD. Requires Windows NT/2000/XP/2003.
dosdev.zip - 2.85 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Command line interface to the DefineDosDevice() and QueryDosDevice() API functions. Defines, redefines and prints information about the emulated DOS devices in Windows NT. Very useful if you want to use any object in Windows NT object namespace from ordinary Win32 applications. (In Windows 95/98/ME this utility is equivalent to the SUBST command.)
enumproto.zip - 2.19 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Utility to display and optionally remove installed Winsock LSP modules Layered Service Providers. Today many spyware/adware/malware install LSP modules to capture network traffic and send statistics to some company. After removing such spyware Winsock APIs may fail for all applications because there are registry references to LSP modules that no longer exists. In Windows XP SP2 you can reset LSP chain using the command netsh winsock reset but with earlier versions it was almost impossible without reinstalling the TCP/IP protocol, as described in KB892350 or KB817571. The enumproto simplifies the procedure of removing LSP modules from the chain and can run on Windows 95 (with Winsock 2.x), 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP and Server 2003.
enumps.zip - 2.95 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Utility to display names of running processes, which dll modules are loaded into different processes and numbers and owner processes of running threads. Requires Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP/2003. It does not work on Windows NT 4.0 or earlier, use psmod instead to enumerate loaded dll files or the pslist tool by SysInternals to enumerate running processes.
exelist.zip - 5.16 KB - compiled 2006-04-27 - Displays information about exe files (and dll and other executable formats loadable in Windows). The utility reads the version resource linked into the exe files and also displays which executable format the image is.
fdf.zip - 9.56 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Utility to search for duplicate files and optionally delete or hard link them to save disk space.
fileinfo.zip - 2.83 KB - compiled 2007-05-24 - Displays information about file attibutes, creation, modification and last access time, index serials (posix i-node number and sequence number) and number of hard links.
finger.zip - 2.20 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Finger service client. The source also compiles fine on most *nix like systems.
getcp.zip - 1.16 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Includes getacp.exe and getoemcp.exe. Returns the ANSI codepage number or the OEM codepage number respectively. Useful in batchfiles where you want to use chcp command to set the codepage to one of the system default.
geteltorito.zip - 2.25 KB - compiled 2008-08-07 - Utility to extract an El Torito default boot image from an ISO CD/DVD image. Useful if you for example want to create a bootable Windows installation CD with an integrated Service Pack and you want it to boot with the El Torito image from the original CD.
gethost.zip - 1.40 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Displays host name and IP address for the local host or specified host name or IP adress. This utility uses the gethost*() functions so it displays exactly what response other applications get when they ask e.g. for the IP address of a given host name.
getkey.zip - 1021 bytes - compiled 2006-03-08 - Waits for a keystroke, converts it to upper case and returns the ascii value for that key. Useful in batchfiles where you want the user to press a key to select something.
joindomain.zip - 1.44 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Join a computer to a domain from the command line. Requires Windows 2000/XP/2003.
junc.zip - 2.62 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Creates/displays/deletes junctions of empty NTFS directories to another NTFS diretory given a native path, possibly on another volume. Works on Windows 2000/XP/2003.
killwin.zip - 5.90 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - The kill.exe, enumwin.exe and showwin.exe utilities used to find, manipulate, close or destroy windows on the current desktop. Useful to kill hung applications by giving window title. kill.exe can also force application to terminate within a given number of seconds by first trying to close the application's window and then if it has not terminated within the given time it terminates the process.
movent.zip - 2.19 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Command line interface to the MoveFileEx() API function. Moves files, possibly delay the actual move until next reboot if you want. Can be used to rename or remove files not movable while the system is running. Reduced functionallity when run in Windows 95/98/ME, does not run under Win32s in Windows 3.x.
popdump.zip - 5.09 KB - compiled 2006-04-27 - Retrieves all e-mail messages from a POP3 mailbox and dumps them as eml files. The eml files can be opened in e.g. Outlook Express.
popman.zip - 5.34 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Useful to list messages in a POP mailbox and delete a message you don't want to receive directly on the server. Useful e.g. if you have a low bandwidth connection and can't receive the e-mail you want just because there is a really big e-mail first at the server...
psmod.zip - 2.58 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Utility to display which dll modules are loaded into different processes. Requires Windows NT 4.0 or 2000/XP/2003. On Windows NT 4.0 the psapi package is required, if you don't have it, i.e. the program complains about psapi.dll, you can get it here. For Windows 95/98/ME platforms, use the enumps tool instead.
rawcopy.zip - 5.42 KB - compiled 2010-02-09 - Reads and writes files and devices. (Cannot read/write disk devices in Windows 95/98/ME or Win32s.) For example useful to write a floppy image file on a harddisk to a physical floppy in Windows NT. (This can also be done by using various Win32 ports of the *nix dd program. But unlike my rawcopy, they usually do not unmount/lock physical devices or partitions during the read/write which makes them quite dangerous to use if anything else is using the device meanwhile...) From version 1.2.1 it can also create sparse output files with a new -s command line switch.
reptxt32.zip - 4.38 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Replaces a text string in any file. Can e.g. be used to change a text string in binary files or make the same text string change in a number of files at a time.
setprio.zip - 3.28 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Displays information about and optionally changes the priority class for a given process id. (Same function as the priority change option in Task Manager, but this is a command line tool that works in Windows 95/98/ME too.) This program does nothing when run in Win32s on Windows 3.x (because there is no process and thread scheduler in Windows 3.x).
shortren.zip - 2.01 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Changes the short filename (MS-DOS compatible 8.3) alias of a file or directory with a long name or a name with characters not allowed in MS-DOS filenames. Requires Windows XP, Server 2003 or later.
sizdir32.zip - 7.70 KB - compiled 2010-02-16 - Lists all files in a given size interval in current directory and all subdirectories and then displays how mutch disk space the files use and how mutch they would use if the allocation block size where changed.
strarc.zip 32-bit - 23.2 KB / strarc64.zip 64-bit 25.9 KB - compiled 2009-12-07 - A console backup/archive tool for Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7. It uses the same backup methods as the ntbackup or robocopy programs and thus backs up all information and meta data on an NTFS volume. The main difference is that strarc is free and open source and produces stream archives you can store on tapes, disks or anywhere else or it can create the archive stream to stdout so that it can be compressed easily using stream compression tools like gzip or bzip2. The command line switches and parameters are quite similar to the *nix tar utility and it can easily be used to clone an entire NTFS volume including everything, files, directories, their time stamps, attributes and security information, compression attribute, alternate data streams, junctions, hard links etc. With this new 0.1.3 release it is even possible to backup the registry database files of a running Windows system. An information file called strarc.txt describing usage and including how-tos and other documentation is included in this zip file. The documentation is also available here.
swapadd.zip - 2.12 KB - compiled 2009-01-14 - Adds a swapfile on a running Windows system.
tickcount.zip - 1.68 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Displays information about how long time the system has been up. (Weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds.)
txtcnv32.zip - 2.81 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Converts text files or text streams from ANSI codepage to OEM codepage or vice versa. With this new release it is now also possible to specify codepages to convert from and to, or to convert from or to 16-bit Unicode from or to a specific codepage.
w32ver.zip - 2.05 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Displays the current version number, build number and service pack level for the current Win32 environment. w32verc.exe displays the information in the console window and w32ver.exe displays it in a dialog box making it compatible with Win32s on Windows 3.x.
whois.zip - 15.2 KB - compiled 2006-05-23 - My Win32 port of the GNU whois client. Automatically directs the query to the right whois server by using tables and following redirections. Now updated to support the new .eu domains.
xcopynt.zip - 3.63 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Copies a complete directory tree to another location. This tools copies files, directories (even empty ones), all attributes, extended attributes, time stamps, security information including access permissions (except in some cases owner and auditing information). Requires Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, XP or Server 2003. The Windows NT 4.0 version of xcopy.exe did not have all this functionallity. Note! The development of this tool has now come to an end. It has several limitations, especially under newer Windows versions (it lacks correct support for hard links, compression attribute, junction points, etc) and it does not work at all under Windows NT version prior to 4.0. I recommend all users of this tool to use the new strarc instead. If you previously typed xcopynt d:\dir\ you may now use strarc and type strarc -c | strarc -x -d:d:\dir\ instead.

Small utilities with graphical user interface (or with no user interface at all)

Works on all versions of Win32 unless the description says something else. This includes at moment Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003 and Windows 3.x with Win32s installed.

These binaries are compiled with the free version of Microsoft Visual C++. They are not linked with the standard C or C++ libraries that comes with this compiler, instead they are linked with a dynamic library I call minwcrt (Minimal Windows C Run-Time Library) linking them to crtdll.dll instead of msvcrt.dll. This makes them run in all versions of Win32.

enumwinw.zip - 10.4 KB - compiled 2004-03-09 - Like the utilities in killwin.zip above, but this one is a graphical interface tool to view information about windows and other graphical objects on the current desktop and possibly show, hide, minimize or close them if you want. This tool requires Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3 or later or Windows 95 or later. It is written in Visual Basic 6 so if it does not work you probably don't have the VB run-time environment installed. You can get it here.
fsplitw.zip - 6.79 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Splits a big file into smaller part files of specified size. Useful to split a large file to many floppies or CD:s. The file parts can be restored to the large file again using the copy /b command at the command line, like copy /b part1+part2+part3 bigfile.
gethostw.zip - 1.64 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Like gethost.zip above, but displays the information in a dialog box instead, making it compatible with Win32s on Windows 3.x (or good if you don't like the console anyway...).
logonwrap.zip - 1.47 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Runs the application specified on command line and waits for it to terminate and then logs out the user session. Particulary useful on Terminal Servers in cases where you want only one single application to run when user logs on and make sure the session is closed properly when that application is terminated.
logout.zip - 1.89 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Command line interface for the ExitWindowsEx() API function. Useful to log out the current user or shutdown or restart the system in the way you want.
regrepl.zip 32-bit - 6.79 KB / regrepl64.zip 64.bit - 8.93 KB - compiled 2009-12-07 - Registry Replace Tool. This program is useful if you have missed a "replace all"-function in the Registry Editor. The new version also supports remote operation on other computers on the network and selecting subkey where the search and replace should start. It supports replacing Ansi and Unicode texts in REG_SZ, REG_MULTI_SZ, REG_EXPAND_SZ and REG_BINARY type registry values. Download screenshot here (9.4 KB).
synctime.zip - 2.80 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Synchronizes the local computer's time with the nist.gov time servers.
tickcntw.zip - 1.39 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Displays a dialog box with information about how long the system has been up. (Weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds.)
w32ver.zip - 2.05 KB - compiled 2006-03-08 - Displays the current version number, build number and service pack level for the current Win32 environment. w32verc.exe displays the information in the console window and w32ver.exe displays it in a dialog box making it compatible with Win32s on Windows 3.x.
winlogoncfg.zip 32-bit - 18.7 KB / winlogoncfg64.zip 64-bit - 19.3 KB - compiled 2009-12-07 - A small utility to view and change settings for the Winlogon process. This includes settings up auto logon feature, logon dialog options and settings for Windows File Protection. Operates on local and remote computers. Requires Windows NT, 2000, XP or Server 2003. A help file with some how-to instructions is included. Download screenshot here (21.3 KB).

.NET applications

These applications are written in Visual Basic 2005. They run in Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista and they require .NET Framework 2.0 or later to be installed first. If they don't work and you have not installed .NET Framework 2.0 or later you can download and install it from Microsofts website.

GraphViewer - published 2007-03-25 - A math application to view graphs of functions. It can also calculate and draw derivative and anti-derivative graphs. The graphs can also be saved to a file or printed on paper. Download screenshot here (22.6 KB).
ODBC Dataviewer - published 2007-03-25 - A small utility to make ODBC connections and send SQL queries. It shows the returned data in an updateable DataGridView so it can be used to edit data through any ODBC-compatible database connection.

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