Tools and utilities for Windows

Update 16 May 2025

• Added peinfo tool. Shows basic metadata and code signing status of PE files, such as Windows exe and dll files.

• Added a --validate switch to VhdBlockBackup. Checks whether existing metadata is still valid for an image file.

Update 5 March 2025

• Bugfix in zipio. The --purge switch no longer worked since last update, but now fixed and works correctly again.

Update 27 Feb 2025

• Several bugfixes in reged and some other tools. Also, added .NET 9.0 versions of most .NET tools and removed .NET 6.0 and 7.0 versions for most of them.

Update 26 June 2024

• Added txtcnv. Text encoding conversion tool that uses modern .NET encoder/decoder classes.

• Added timelim. Limits execution time for a process, including subprocesses.

• Bugfix in setprio. Process name search failed on older Windows versions.

Update 15 May 2024

• Added VhdBlockBackup. Disk image block based backup tool. Uses block checksum lists to compare and calculate differences that are transferred to new differencing image files. An example.txt file is included in the archive and describes how to use this tool.

• Added waitps. Waits for one or more process ids or process names to terminate. Useful to have something done automatically when a long-running task is completed.

• Added setpkgver. Tool for checking for updated NuGet packages and upgrade references in .NET project files, or to set specific versions where * is currently specified. Lots of command line options available to narrow down what exactly should be modified.

Minor update 16 April 2024

• Fixed library issue that caused corrupted text output formatting for many of the C/C++ tools. This happened when terminal was wider than 254 columns. Affected tools recompiled.

Update 15 April 2024

• Added support for mount points to devioctl. This makes it possible to specify disk volumes using a directory mount point, such as devioctl flush C:\mountdir.

• Change junc tool so that query mode works without administrative privileges.

Update 11 April 2024

• Introducing reged tool. A cross-platform offline command line registry editing tool to query and modify data in Windows registry hive files without mounting the hive file in Windows. Can also access registry hives inside virtual machine image files. Works on all platforms with a compatible version of .NET runtime installed.

• Changed output formatting for DiskVolumes tool.

  • Volume sizes are now formatted such as "1.2 TB" for better readability.

  • Mount points are now shown on separate lines and indented.

• Updated WMI library reference for GetProductKey tool.

Update 21 March 2024

• Version 1.0.0 of Find Duplicate Files, fdf

  • Changed scan logic to work more efficiently with large files.

  • Now supports Unicode file names, both from command line parameters and when scanning subdirectories. This breaks compatibility with Windows 95/98/ME.

Minor fix 31 January 2024

• Version 1.0.16 of ImDiskNet library and DiscUtilsDevio command line tool.

  • Fixed issue with published zip files that contained wrong versions of some third-party dll files.

Update 31 January 2024

• Version 1.0.15 of ImDiskNet library and DiscUtilsDevio command line tool.

  • Fixed some library dependencies and removed some unnecessary library dependencies.

Update 25 October 2023

• Version 1.3.9.16 of rawcopy.

  • New command line switch -b used to enable backup privileges to bypass file system security, if allowed by current user account.

  • Changed verbose output from standard output to standard error to make it easier to combine verbose messages with writing to redirected standard output.

Bugfix 3 July 2023

• Fixed issue in checksum tool. Calculated wrong checksums when several files were calculated simultaneously, either by several file names specified as command line parameters or by specifying wildcards at command line.

Minor update 28 January 2023

• Added dnsreport tool. Shows some basic information about IP addresses reported in DKIM/SPF report files about e-mail attempts from not-allowed IP addresses.

• Added splitbystr tool. Splits input text file by a string token into separate output files.
  

Minor update 4 January 2023

• Version 0.3.0l of Stream archiver, strarc. Attempt to workaround "privilege not held" errors when extracting files across network etc.

Minor update 15 November 2022

• Added ARM64 builds of some more tools.

Web site update 06 November 2022

• This web site now runs all active pages on ASP.NET Core and all downloadable files are served by a separate faster static file web server. There could be migration related issues in some places, please report to me if you see anything broken!

Update 13 June 2022

• Fixed missing files in .NET tools zip archives, corrected some links etc.

Update 7 November 2021

• ImDisk 2.1.1 installer self-extraction did not work. Fixed. (No files changed in the package, version is still 2.1.1.)

Update 5 November 2021 

• New version 2.1.1 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Some minor fixes and changes.

  • AWEAlloc driver had a problem when applications used it directly to allocate memory and tried to read beyond the allocated size. The consequences were failure to release a lock which meant that subsequent reads and writes failed with an error code about a busy device. This bug had no consequences for use with ImDisk though.

  • Control Panel applet now relaunches itself with request for administrative privileges if launched with reduced privileges (UAC).

  • Updated DiscUtilsDevio package with most recent DiscUtils modules.

  • All source code for ImDisk components and .NET libraries are now available in a Github repository .

  • The current signing certificate used now is not supported by Windows versions older than Windows 7. This is only a problem in versions where driver signatures are enforced, that is Vista and Server 2008, x64 editions. The new drivers will not load under these versions.

Update 10 September 2021 

• New version 1.1.0.4 of Zero and random device driver. Fixed a potential risk of BSOD in the driver and fixed issues with the setup package.

Update 30 August 2021

• New version 1.1.0.3 of Zero and random device driver. The driver now uses system cryptographic random number generator on Vista and later versions of Windows.

Update 6 August 2021

• Fixed a bug in 32 bit version of swapadd that caused an error message about an invalid second parameter.

• Fixed a bug in devioctl related to the storprop parameter that caused error message "incorrect function" in some cases even when the underlying disk had support for storage properties requests.

Update 21 January 2019

• DevIO 3.05: Published updated binary releases for FreeBSD and Linux. They include the fix for partition recognition from November.

Update 18 November 2018

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 2.0.10 and DevIO 3.05 : Fixed a problem with auto-detecting logical partitions in extended partitions. In this new version it also supports auto-detecting more than eight partitions.

Minor update 10 November 2018

• Fixed some timestamps for downloadable exe files, for example ImDisk setup package. This problem started during a server migration in October.

Minor update 13 May 2018

• Several exe files for ARM architecture rebuilt with Visual Studio 2013 to link with msvcr120.dll instead of the newer runtime library system used by Visual Studio 2015.

Minor update 26 Aug 2016

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver: Added "manifest" file for better looking buttons and controls in control panel applet. Also updated readme.txt file to include some information about compatibility issues and similar.

Minor update 24 Aug 2016

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver and Zero and Random Device Driver setup packages modified to be less vulnerable to DLL/EXE hijacking and similar. Also added a note about the importance to download setup packages to a new empty directory.

Website 9 July 2016

• Updated link to ImDisk Toolkit because project has been moved to SourceForge.

Bugfix 1 July 2016

• Release 0.3.0k of Stream Archiver, StrArc.
  • Fixed a problem that caused restoring extended attributes for directories to fail with "Access denied" error messages. Extended attributes are rarely used for directories but it has been seen for example for storing access control lists for Linux and similar NFS clients.

Update 19 March 2016

• Added ARM architecture builds for some tools. For instance rawcopy, strarc, devioctl, dosdev and a few others that could be useful on Windows 10 IoT Core ARM edition. Drivers like ImDisk and ZeroDrv will also be published for ARM platforms in near future.

Bugfix 18 December 2015

• Devioctl tool.
  • Fixed mistake that caused the RESCAN command to not work. It should now work as expected, for instance: devioctl rescan scsi0:

Bugfix 16 December 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 2.0.9.
  • Fixed serious issue. Attempts to create larger physical memory RAM disks than allowed by current free amount of memory could cause blue-screen crash.

Bugfixes 8 December 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 2.0.8.
  • Fixed serious issue when using proxy services that support the new unmap and zero requests (also known as TRIM). The problem could cause hangs, crashes in both user mode and kernel mode, the latter could cause blue-screen crashes.
  • Fixed another issue when using the -o sparse flag. This problem could cause unexpected disk write failures when writing to virtual disks backed by sparse image files.
  • Added a safe-guard check that verifies that a virtual disk about to be created is larger than 64 KB. There have been a few cases where various applications have created smaller virtual disks by mistake which has caused crashes in filesystem drivers.
  • Split imdisk.sys driver source code into eight source files to improve readability.

Minor update 30 November 2015

• Devio tool

  • Fixed problems with building on systems with big endian CPU architectures and some other scenarios with modern Linux editions. There are now also links to built binaries for Windows x86, Linux x86, FreeBSD x86 and FreeBSD x64 on the website.

Update 16 November 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 2.0.7.
  • Fixed problems formatting new virtual disks on latest Windows 10 updates.
  • Dropdown list with free drive letters in Control Panel applet.
  • Some changes related to source files, development etc:
    • ImDisk driver source file is now C++ instead of C. New name is sys\imdisk.cpp.
    • Makefile in root of source tree is now improved to make it easier for anyone to simply download WDK 7 and build everything. Variables for using signing certificates etc could be added later when needed.
    • Resource (.rc) files now adjusted to work with Visual Studio.
    • Experimental Visual Studio solution and project files for making it easier to edit and build using WDK 8.1 and later and using Visual Studio 2013 and later. WDK 7 could still be used for Makefile-based builds where that is preferred.
    • Devio sources modified to make it possible to build correctly on modern Linux, FreeBSD, etc OS with gmake and various *nix C/C++ compilers.

Bugfixes 17 August 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 2.0.6.
  • Device list in Control Panel applet did not auto-refresh when new virtual disks where added or removed by other applications, such as command line tool. This has now been corrected and it should no longer be necessary to manually click refresh button in this case.
• Release 0.3.0h of Stream Archiver, StrArc.
  • Restoring files and directories sometimes failed with "Access denied" error messages, particularly to external drives, attached virtual disks and similar. This should now be corrected.

Bugfix 9 August 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 2.0.5.
  • Device list in Control Panel applet did not correctly show memory backed virtual disk that had been initialized with an image file.
  • Support for sending an image path (or any custom string) through to proxy server. Syntax is server:port://path where :port just like previously is optional and defaults to 9000. The //path part is sent through to server end as an IMDPROXY_REQ_CONNECT request and makes it possible for one proxy service listening to one single port to handle requests for many different images.

Bugfix 5 August 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 2.0.4.
  • Fixed problem that could cause formatting to fail in some cases.

Bugfix 4 August 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 2.0.3.
  • Fixed serious issue with wrong drive formatted by command line tool.

Update 1 August 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 2.0.2.
  • Fixed issue with saving virtual disk as image file from Control Panel applet or Explorer context menu.
  • New command line option -o shared that forces driver to open images in shared write mode.

Update 29 July 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 2.0.1. Finalized version of earlier beta, with these additions/changes.
  • Fixed issue with using directories as mount point.
  • Separate "zero range" and "unmap range" requests sent to proxy, when proxy indicates support for such requests.

Minor update 21 May 2015

• w32ver.exe and w32verc.exe updated to display correct version number even on Windows 8.1 and later.
• New features and updated help text added to devioctl.exe.

Update 16 May 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver beta 2.0.0.

  • Rewritten I/O request logic to allow fully parallel I/O. This is by default only used when communicating with AWEAlloc driver for physical memory virtual disks, but can be turned on for any virtual disks backed by an image file or another kernel level driver, provided that the underlying driver supports it. Use -o par command line option to turn on this feature. This change should give better physical RAM disk performance. It should also give better performance for instance when using ImDisk to mount offsets of \\?\PhysicalDrive objects as virtual disks.
  • AWEAlloc driver rewritten to support multiple requests simultaneously, which means that ImDisk no longer need to queue requests and switch to a worker thread to complete requests to a physical memory RAM disk.
  • Support for TRIM requests sent from filesystem drivers on Windows 7 and later. Forwarded as either file level TRIM requests to image file or in case image file is a sparse file, as "zero data" requests. TRIM requests can optionally also be forwarded to proxy applications if proxy application supports it. This should make it easier to develop proxy services that support freeing parts of a virtual disks that are no longer in use.
  • Bugfix: Fixed problem which caused sparse files to sometimes be created as fully allocated files.
  • Bugfix: Impossible to specify a device number when calling ImDiskCreateDeviceEx. Automatic device number was always used.

Website update 3 May 2015

• Added link to Arsenal Image Mounter.

Bugfix 2 April 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 1.9.4.
  • Fixed bug in awealloc driver that appeared in version 1.9.3. This bug made it impossible to use physical RAM as storage for virtual disks.

Update 1 April 2015

• ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 1.9.3.
  • Uninstall script now shows Control Panel applet if there are any existing drives that can be removed by user. If devices exist that are already in the process of being removed, uninstall carries on and may ask for reboot at the end.
  • Corrected bug in command line tool. The -m #: syntax did not work if it appeared before -a on the command line.
  • Fixed bug that could cause image file saving to fail. This happened when dismounting a memory backed disk from Explorer context menu and this disk had been created without using an image file.
  • Symbolic links are now created for each ImDisk device. Device number 0 can be opened using path \\?\ImDisk0 from a Win32 application.
• Modified the dosdev tool so that it returns errorlevel other than zero if an error occurs.

Update 26 March 2015

• Added several new features to devioctl tool. It can now offline and online disks and volumes, set or reset readonly property on disks and show physical disk extents for each disk volume. It can also change partition type for existing disk partitions.
• Corrected a minor mistake in strarc syntax help. Also updated strarc.txt document and added descriptions about recently added features.

Minor update 21 Feb 2015

• Minor corrections to history page.

Update 2 Feb 2015

• Added some tools in the .NET section. For example tools for zip files, database queries, sending and receiving e-mails as files, calculating checksums, coordinate transformations and calculations and a few other things.

Layout changes 10 Jan 2015

• Some layout changes on the website to make it easier to view on mobiles, tablets etc.

Bugfix 17 Dec 2014

• Bugfix release 1.9.2 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
  • Data corruption could occur when loading large disk images into virtual memory on Windows XP and older Windows versions. Thanks to v77 for reporting this bug.

Bugfix 15 Dec 2014

• Bugfix release 1.9.1 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
  • There was a problem related to drive letters when mounting drives in Control Panel applet in 32 bit version of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 1.9.0. Thanks to v77 for reporting this bug.

Update 14 Dec 2014

• Release 1.9.0 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
  • AWEAlloc
    • "Error" event log records changed severity level to "Information".
    • Possible performance reducing code path corrected in AWEAlloc. Page mapping function had a local unwind from exception protection code. Some tests show that AWEAlloc memory disk access performance has increased by around 4-5 %.
  • ImDisk virtual disk objects now support ZwQueryInformationFile/FileStandardInformation to query size as file size.
  • devio.exe 3.03.
    • Supports --novhd switch to disable dynamic vhd file detection.
    • Safer detection of dynamic vhd format (no longer detects diff format).
  • ImDisk "raw" (non-disk) mode now supports file pointer requests to emulate one single file volume.
  • Added a few more security checks to various function calls in ImDisk and AWEAlloc.
  • ImDisk now ignores any errors when attempting to read volume boot record to auto-detect geometry parameters.
  • ImDisk source code: Cleaned up annotations and debug asserts.
  • ImDisk API: New API functions for manually sending shell notifications for arrived or removed drive letters.
  • ImDisk, fixed bug: Notifications on drive removal did not remove MountPoints/MountPoints2 registry keys.
  • Fixed missing function exports in "core version" of imdisk.cpl.

Bugfix 8 Dec 2014

• Release 0.3.0f of Stream Archiver, StrArc.
  • Bugfix: Compression attribute was not restored for directories, only for files. Thanks to Alexander Steinbrecher for reporting this bug.

Update 17 Sept 2014

• Release 1.8.5 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.

  • Update/install scripts now make sure to kill any existing helper service process before updating any files. Hopefully this solves most of the cases where reboot have been needed after uninstall/upgrade.
  • API library change. When IMDISK_API_NO_BROADCAST_NOTIFY is active, create and remove routines now pass the DDD_NO_BROADCAST_SYSTEM flag to DefineDosDevice (on Windows 2000 or later).
  • Fixed some typos in help texts. Thanks to "v77".
  • Kernel driver change. Device threads now use NtReadFile/NtWriteFile instead of ZwReadFile/ZwWriteFile when reading and writing image files directly. This change is to improve performance and reduce risks for resource deadlocks in filesystem drivers.

Important fix 10 July 2014

• Release 1.8.4 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver

  • Fixed a bug in dispatching I/O flush requests, which could cause blue-screens under certain scenarios.

Important fix 4 July 2014

• Release 1.8.3 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver

  • Fixed a bug in dispatching I/O flush requests, which caused certain database engines and a few other uses to fail.

Update 28 May 2014

• Release 1.8.2 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
  • New command line switch -P that can be used with -a to persist settings for creating a virtual disk in registry, or with -d to remove such settings for an existing virtual disk. Only a few, rather basic, settings could be saved in this way. Settings for formatting or similar that requires interaction with other applications are not possible to save with this new -P switch.
  • AWEAlloc driver: Protection against possible data corruption when multiple I/O requests are handled simultaneously. Not necessary when used with ImDisk, but could add some extra protection when awealloc is used from other applications or drivers.
  • ImageOffset REG_QWORD registry setting, to specify offset within image file. Implemented primarily to make it possible to save -b switch settings in registry.
  • Corrected some calls to IoCallDriver to make sure that not the wrong level driver is called in the device stack used for proxy communication. No problems have been reported because of this, though, but this correction makes sure that proxy communication works correctly even if filter drivers are loaded for the communication device.
  • Cache latest I/O block in the same way as in Arsenal Image Mounter, to be returned directly in dispatch routine. This could improve performance in cases where applications or filesystem drivers frequently access the same areas on the virtual disk.
  • AWEAlloc driver: Support for automatically expanding the in-memory "file" when writing beyond EOF.
  • Support for passing through IOCTL/FSCTL requests through ImDisk driver down to the image file. Could be useful to send direct filesystem control commands directly to the driver that handles the underlying image file..

Update 1 May 2014

• Release 1.8.0 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
  • "Emergency remove" option in Control Panel applet. Similar to -R on command line.
    
  • Command line tool could get stuck in endless loop when error occurred when attempting to load hung driver. There are now a few further protections to avoid this.
    
  • Temporary drive letter assignment during formatting from command line tool. This will hopefully fix the problem with formatting wrong drive when drive letter is already defined by an already existing other device. It also means that it will be possible to format new virtual disks with no assigned drive letters, as long as a temporary drive letter could be assigned during format operation.
  • A minor mistake in imdisk.h, about ImDiskOpenDeviceByNumber: the description speaks of a "FileName" argument instead of "DeviceNumber".
  • Byte-swap feature. A new command line option to instruct driver to byte-swap all I/O buffers. This is useful when recovering files from hard disks from some embedded devices or similar that store data in reverse byte order.
  • Setup helper applications without crtdll.dll dependencies. This makes it easier to install on Windows Server Core editions where 32 bit crtdll.dll is not included.

Minor update 18 March 2014

• Release 0.3.0a of Stream Archiver, StrArc.
  • Corrected a problem that caused extraction to stop on files with alternate data streams.

Minor update 7 March 2014

• Rawcopy 1.3.2.

  • Change behaviour when output device/file cannot be opened with the OPEN_ALWAYS flag. Now, in case of failure, it falls back to trying OPEN_EXISTING instead, which should make it possible to write raw blocks to disk devices even on "modern" versions of Windows.

Minor update 21 February 2014

• Release 0.3.0 of Stream Archiver, StrArc .

  • Hard links between read-only files where impossible to restore. Additionally, another problem caused the application to crash after such hard link restore failures. Both problems are now corrected.

  • A new switch, -s:8, can be used to skip storing short 8.3 names on backup, or to skip restoring such names on restore.

  • A new switch, -w:8, can be used to suppress warnings when short 8.3 names cannot be restored during a restore operation.

• Rawcopy 1.3.1.

  • A new switch, -o, can be used to start writing at a specified offset. This can be useful to directly write a specific block on hard disk volume, for example.

Minor update 13 February 2014

• Release 0.2.0e of Stream Archiver, StrArc .

  • Fixed a problem with include/exclude filter strings specified on command line. Only first specified string was used in versions 0.2.0 - 0.2.0d.

Minor update 8 February 2014

• Release 0.2.0d of Stream Archiver, StrArc .

  • Fixed several problems that caused archive attributes not to be cleared after full or incremental backups.

Update 25 October 2013

• Release 1.7.6 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.

  • API changed so that CreateDevice/Ex and RemoveDevice now handle directory mount points directly. This makes it possible for applications to call just one function for most common mount or dismount tasks. This also indirectly means that DiscUtilsDevio.exe now handle directory mount points as well, which it did not do before.

  • Uninstall script. Idea via e-mail from "kbh". When ImDisk is uninstalled from Add/Remove programs in Control Panel, it now checks first to see if there are any existing ImDisk virtual disks that need to be dismounted first. Otherwise, it goes on with stopping services and unloading drivers so that uninstall could finish without any need for reboot.

  • All exe, sys, dll, cpl and similar files are now signed with trusted certificate. Previously, only kernel level modules have been signed.

  • Correction to shared memory proxy client in ImDisk driver. This component now correctly split I/O requests that are too large for the supplied shared memory buffer.

  • Decimal numbers are now allowed in disk size / extend size fields in Control Panel applet.

Update 14 June 2013

• Release 1.7.5 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.

  • Added same device change notifications for 32 bit as for 64 bit version. Tested on Windows NT 3.51 up to Windows 8 and it seems to work as correctly as it possibly can now.

Update 13 June 2013

• Release 1.7.4 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.

  • Changed notifications when adding or removing drive letters. This is an attempt to avoid problems with "dead" drive letters remaining in Windows Explorer after dismount, or not-appearing new drive letters on mount. Thanks to user "v77" for suggestions.

  • Changed listview in Control Panel applet so that entire rows get selected instead of just drive letter.

Update 27 May 2013

• Release 1.7.3 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
  • Another bug, similar to the one corrected in 1.7.2, has been found. This one could cause blue screens when a new virtual disk was created after the driver had been in use for a while. The cause of this bug has been identified and the problem is fixed in version 1.7.3.
  • Fixed the setup package so that awealloc driver is now set to auto-start at system startup. This means that physical memory backed virtual disks now could be created without any further configuration after setup.

Update 13 May 2013

• Release 1.7.2 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
  • A bug was introduced in 1.7.0 when support for more than 64 devices was added. This bug could, in rare cases, cause blue screens when the ImDisk driver had not been in use for a while and user requested a list of existing devices. This bug has now been fixed and 1.7.2 is a release version.

Update 28 March 2013

• Beta release 1.7.1 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
  • The awealloc driver can now pre-load allocated memory with contents of an image file. This feature can be used through the ImDisk API by specifying file type virtual disk together with an AWE flag when mounting an image file. Command line users can specify -o awe and Control Panel applet users can tick a "physical memory" box to use this feature.
  • .NET assemblies, C/C++ headers and libraries etc has been updated with the new AWE flag. Also a few new API functions to detect "memory disks" of any kind, either directly using virtual memory in the ImDisk driver or physical memory through awealloc.

Update 21 March 2013

• Release 0.2.0 of strarc
  • Paths longer than 260 characters were not possible to backup or restore. This has now been fixed and strarc can now be used to backup and restore directory paths containing up to 32,767 characters.
  • In backup mode (-c), it is now possible to specify -n instead of archive file. This skips actual backup operation and just enumerates directories and files that would have been backed up. Useful to find possible errors and/or in combination with -l (or -v) to list files that would have been backed up.

Update 15 March 2013

• Fixed issue with data corruption when restoring sparse files from strarc archives. Archives containing sparse files, made with older versions of strarc, are compatible and can be restored correctly with the new version.

Update 10 March 2013

• Notice about known bugs and limitations for strarc. Some serious bugs have been found, that may cause data corruption.

Update 8 March 2013

• Beta release 1.7.0 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
  • Changed entire logic around device numbers. In practice, this means that ImDisk now supports 64,000 simultaneous virtual devices instead of 64. On the other hand, some existing applications that use ImDisk may experience compatibility issues if they rely on the old 64 bit device list bit field. There is a new API function in imdisk.cpl (ImDiskGetDeviceListEx) that returns complete drive list with the new driver version. For .NET applications, no changes should be necessary as long as applications work with the new version of ImDiskNet.dll, which takes care of changes internally. Also, note that devices are now not necessarily returned in device number order.
  • New function exported from imdisk.cpl. RunDLL_MountFileW. This makes it possible to send Unicode filenames to "mount new" dialog, which means that Unicode filenames now work correctly when for example right-click on a file in Windows Explorer.
  • New device type option "raw", in addition to existing "fd", "cd" and "hd". Raw creates a device with type FILE_DEVICE_UNKNOWN, which means that Windows will not try to mount any filesystems or similar on the virtual device. This could be useful in combination with third-party drivers which could provide other device objects and just use this ImDisk device as backing store.
  • Fixed problem with "media type" when auto-detecting geometry from BIOS Parameter Block (Volume Boot Record) values.
  • Driver now creates a global event object that applications can open to synchronize with refresh events. This event is fired by driver after changes such as drives added or removed or settings changed for existing drives. The event object can be opened using a new API function ImDiskOpenRefreshEvent and used with operating system wait functions. .NET applications can use a new method ImDiskAPI.OpenRefreshEvent to get a WaitHandle in a similar way, or just consume a static event, ImDiskAPI.DriveListChanged. For example, the Control Panel applet now uses this refresh event and thereby refreshes drive list automatically when drives are added or removed from other places, such as command line, API or Windows Explorer context menu options.
  • "Estimated size" for Control Panel Add/Remove Programs changed to 320 KB. Should look more realistic.
  • Please note that this version has some major technical changes and is currently in beta stage. Until it is proved stable, it will only be available through separate beta release links.
  • Control Panel applet changed so that no drive letters are displayed for drives with "lost" drive letters. This could happen if a new drive has been mounted with the same drive letter afterwards, or similar. This also means that it should now be possible to remove such "lost" drives directly from Control Panel applet.

Minor update 13 Feb 2013

• Bug fixed in devioctl tool. When using "geometry" parameter, the wrong source data was presented as "BPB physical drive number". Also added a few more fields from FAT Extended BPB and changed some fields to hexadecimal display.

Update 2 Nov 2012

• Release 1.6.0 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
  • Changes to virtual disk geometry. The driver now reports disk geometry based on volume boot sector values, when such values exist. There were also errors in LBA to CHS conversion when building image files with master boot records, which should now be fixed.
  • Partition auto-detection works with partition entries that start at beginning of raw image file. This practically only happens for "hybrid" ISO/HDD image files, which did not work correctly with ImDisk partition auto-detection in earlier versions. This change has also been made to the partition detection logic in devio in a corresponding way.
  • Support for sparse image files. A new command line option -o sparse causes ImDisk to create a sparse image file. This effectively sets sparse flag using FSCTL_SET_SPARSE, it causes image file size not to be increased to virtual disk automatically and it causes the image write routines to call FSCTL_SET_ZERO_DATA when an all-zero block is written to image.
  • The driver now uses tagged kernel pool allocations. This means that poolmon.exe and other kernel memory monitoring, verifying and leak detecting tools that work on running drivers will work more like expected with ImDisk. Pool tag for imdisk.sys is now "ImDi" and for awealloc.sys it has been changed to "AWEA".
  • The "wait for Windows Explorer" feature when double click on a drive icon in Control Panel applet, introduced in version 1.5.7, now has a timeout of five seconds.
  • New API functions. One for detecting ISO CD/DVD image files by recognizing a filesystem signature. Another for reading disk geometry values defined in volume boot record fields, into a DISK_GEOMETRY data structure. Functions available both in C/C++ "flat" API and in .NET API library.
  • Discussion about this ImDisk release in this forum thread.

Update 26 Aug 2012

• Update to checksum tool. Added parameters for using HMAC keyed hash providers. Such providers can mix in a secret key so that hashes only matches if same secret key is known when hash is later verified. Also added parameters for loading hash providers from custom assemblies.

Update 30 July 2012

• Release 1.0.1 of Zero and Random Device Driver.
  • Corrected an issue where read buffers of non-multiple of four bytes to the random device were not filled with random numbers to the last up to three bytes.
  • Changed the random data generator slightly to fill all possible bits randomly. Previously, the high-order bit of each fourth bytes were never filled with 1, and the low-order bit of next coming bytes were not filled with 1 with same probability as other bits.
  • Corrected an issue where read buffers of non-multiple of four bytes to the random device were not filled with random numbers to the last bytes.
  • The random device is now a little bit slower, but still works a lot faster and with better random data on 64 bit Windows compared to 32 bit.
• Update to ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver setup package. The install script in ImDisk setup package has changed so that it skips displaying message boxes if environment variable IMDISK_SILENT_SETUP is set to the value of 1.

Minor update 16 Feb 2012

• Release 1.5.7 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Change in Control Panel applet: When user double clicks on a disk icon in device list, the applet will now check first that drive letter is recognized by Windows Explorer, before sending a command to Windows Explorer to open the drive root folder. This check avoids the possible "Path does not exist" error messages from Windows Explorer that could turn up in earlier versions. The change does not apply on Windows NT 4.0 and older where there is no drive list internally cached within Windows Explorer. While the applet code is waiting for drive letter to appear in Explorer, user can click a "Cancel" button to cancel out from the wait operation.

Update 15 Feb 2012

• Corrected a problem with txtcnv32. In-place conversion of files larger than 1 GB were not correct.
• Release 1.5.6 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver:
• API has been extended with new functions. Read inc\imdisk.h in source archive for documentation about C/C++ usage, or look here for documentation about .NET API. There are also, as usual, xml files with method/parameter descriptions available to each assembly file.
• Control Panel applet: When a new virtual disk is created, it is automatically selected in device list.

Update 14 Jan 2012

• Added 64 bit ports of some more tools.
• Added some console based .NET tools, coordtool, checksum and netcheck .

Update 15 Nov 2011

• New feature added to the rawcopy tool. Differential copy mode where each block is compared between source and target and only copied when different. There is a new switch -D for this. Thanks to "LZ" for idea and modification.
• Release 1.5.3 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver:
• A serious bug in awealloc driver has been corrected. Data corruption could occur on awealloc backed disks larger than 4 GB.
• Function ImDiskStartService in API has changed so that it returns TRUE when the service is already running. GetLastError() will return ERROR_SERVICE_ALREADY_RUNNING in that case. This means that imdisk.exe and Control Panel applet will behave more correctly now when another start control has been sent to driver or service while these ImDisk control programs are waiting to be able to start them. Thanks to "dickfitzwell" in reboot.pro forum for reporting this problem.
• .NET/COM API has changed to use the modified ImDiskStartService native API function instead of .NET ServiceController class which means that no exception is thrown now when LoadDriver or LoadHelperService methods are called when driver or service are already loaded.

Minor update 5 Nov 2011

• The -i switch to rawcopy did not work correctly. The copy progress stopped on read errors even if -i switch was given on command line and error messages were not displayed correctly in verbose mode for each I/O error. This is now fixed.
• Changed the swapadd tool to display both current size and used size of paging files.

Update 17 Oct 2011

• Release 1.5.2 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Fixed an error in setup package. On some systems, ImDisk could be upgraded but not installed without an existing older version already installed. Application notifications changed when virtual disks are created or removed. Added a flag to tell Windows not to wait for applications that appear hung to process the notification.

• Release 1.5.1 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
• Setup package changed. It now registers drivers and service with start mode set to "auto" so that they will start automatically at system startup. It also automatically starts drivers and service automatically at the end of setup so that they will be immediately available. This should make setup easier, particularly on Windows versions with UAC.
• Setup package now operate as follows. First, it checks if there is an existing version of ImDisk installed and if there are any virtual disks mounted. If there are any, it displays a message that existing virtual disks should be dismounted before upgrade. Otherwise it stops any existing drivers and service that are about to be upgraded and continues with install/upgrade .inf script. Then, starts the drivers and service and displays a message box that setup was successful. This means that installed or upgraded version will be available immediately.
• A new switch has been added to ImDisk command line control program. The new option is -R and it can be used to remove a hung virtual disk when nothing else helps. It is a dangerous operation though, it does not attempt to dismount the filesystem on the virtual disk or any other cleanup operation, so it should only be used when no other option is available. It could be useful for example for proxy type virtual disks where the proxy server has stopped responding and driver thread is hung waiting for a proxy response.
• The devio program has moved to version 3.01. It now checks if the object name to be used for shared memory communication is already used. In that case it just displays an error message and exits. The objects for shared memory communication are now also automatically created in global namespace so explicitly prefix object names with Global prefix is no longer needed. The DiscUtilsDevio tool has also been changed in the same ways.

• Release 1.5.0 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver.
• Rewrote allocation logic in awealloc driver in ImDisk package. From this version awealloc attempts to allocate blocks from as high memory addresses as possible, even if not all requested memory is available there, then allocating rest of requested memory at lower addresses. This makes it transparent to user, but each failing allocation attempt is logged in Windows event log.
• ImDisk now supports shared memory and kernel synchronization objects for transferring I/O requests and data between driver and user mode proxy service. This should speed up I/O request somewhat, although performance gain compared to TCP/IP is most notable on old Windows versions, especially prior to Windows XP.
• The devio tool, the sample proxy service for proxy-mode ImDisk operation has got some new features. Most notably support for new shared memory communication described above, but also support for loading third-party DLL files implementing a simple I/O request API which makes it easier for developers to write modules that support other image file formats and similar. The I/O request API could be either plain DLL function calls or a class in a .NET class library. This has for example been tested with DiscUtils library, a library that supports many image file formats.
• Fixed a problem in ImDiskNet.dll, the .NET/COM class library for using ImDisk API. The problem caused exceptions about missing functions on 64 bit Windows and when that was later fixed the same exceptions started to occur on 32 bit Windows instead. The current combination of latest imdisk.cpl and ImDiskNet.dll should work correctly.

• Chsize32 updated to support larger file sizes than 4 GB.
• Rawcopy updated to support skipforward and copylength parameters in files larger than 4 GB. Also added a new switch -f that can be used to retry failed I/O operations a specified number of times before the operation is considered failed.

• Release 1.4.2 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Added a new API function, ImDiskCreateDeviceEx where caller can get device number of created device. Also added a corresponding function to .NET/COM DLL (now version 1.002).

• Release 1.4.1 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. Corrected some serious memory allocation bugs, memory access bugs etc for 64 bit version. Hopefully this will solve problems reported for large memory disks. Thanks to David Wren, Passmark, for debugging. Also changed the "attached disk notification" sent to other applications in an attempt to solve a few problems reported about invisible and incompatible ImDisk drives on Windows 7.

• Final release ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver 1.4.0.

• Beta release ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver version 1.4.0:
• Corrected a serious bug that seems to have particularly caused blue screen crashes on 64 bit Windows versions on multi-processor computers. Thanks to Bruce Cran for helping the project with debugging on 64 bit architecture.
  
• Graphical user interface, that is Control Panel applet and right-click menu option in Explorer now shows option to add MBR (Master Boot Record) while saving disk contents to image file.
• Algorithm for selecting default virtual disk geometry (C/H/S geometry) for virtual hard disk volumes changed. From this version, driver will auto-select 255/63/512 geometry in most cases. Only exception from this is when virtual disk is smaller than about 2 GB in which case smaller tracks per cylinder size is chosen. User defined virtual geometry can still be manually selected using command line or API directly.
  
• ImDisk source archive now contains a subdirectory called ImDiskNet. This is a .NET dll file which could be used from for example VB.NET or C# to create/modify/delete/save etc virtual disks. This dll also contains a class that can be used as a COM object from VB6 or VBScript etc. This dll is also available for direct download here .
  
• 64 bit setup now installs 32 bit imdisk.cpl and imdisk.exe in addition to the usual 64 bit versions. This means that API calls and command line calls will work from 32 bit applications even on 64 bit Windows without tweaking with installing dlls manually in correct directories etc.
• Updated "devio" tool. This version supports both reading and writing dynamic resizing .vhd files used by Microsoft Virtual PC, Virtual Server and Hyper-V. Earlier version had a serious bug that would corrupt disk image when mounted for both reading and writing.
• Changed notification that is sent to other applications when a new virtual disk is created. ImDisk does no longer wait for all applications to process the notification. It however still waits for all applications to process the notification that is sent when a virtual disk is about to be deleted.

• Some files were missing in the source.7z archive and some old files included by mistake. Cleaned up Makefile etc. Thanks to Alberto Martínez for notifying me about this.
  

• Release 1.3.1 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver . Two problems have been corrected.
• Device control code IOCTL_IMDISK_QUERY_DEVICE did not report image file offset.
• On Windows versions with UAC, proxy connection did not work because of permission errors when connecting to the helper service.

• Release 1.3.0 of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver . New registry setting DisallowedDriveLetters that can be used to specify drive letters not allowed to be used for ImDisk virtual disks. It should be a string value containing drive letters to disallow. The value should be created under the key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ImDisk\Parameters.
  

• The zip archives for 64 bit editions of strarc and regrepl had been replaced by 32 bit versions by mistake in the recent updates of this page. This has been corrected now. Thanks to Anton Yermakoff for notifying me about this problem. If you have got 32 bit versions because of this during this time you can now correct that by downloading the new archives.

• 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 options to select unbuffered I/O and direct DASD I/O.

• 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.

• 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 resulting 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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 swap files. Useful if you want to create a swap file on a disk-less (RAM-booted) machine, or if you want to create a swap file 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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) .

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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:

• 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.
  

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• Some changes have been made to ImDisk. It is now possible to set or reset the removable 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.

• 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.

• 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 whether or not to continue without dismounting the volume. The operation continued even if "Cancel" was selected in the message box. That is now corrected.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.
• 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 destroyed contents of mounted files.

• 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.

• 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 reasonable now.

• 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.

• Added a new tool called geteltorito. More information by the link to geteltorito.zip.

• Several 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.

• Fixed the ImDisk install package. The old .inf file seems to have been packaged 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 restoring 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.

• 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) .

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Fixed a problem with ImDisk. The command line tool imdisk.exe had a misleading help text 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.

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

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

• Corrected the link to dosdev.zip.

• 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).

• 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.

• Fixed several broken links on this page.

• 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.

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

• 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.
  

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

• 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.
  

• 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...

• 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/zero 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 check box in winlogoncfg. It is now possible to enable/disable the requirement of pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete to log on 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.

• 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-relocatable) exe files. This saved some file size.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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-to:s.

• 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.

• 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 application terminates.
• Also added some new features to fdf and fileinfo.

• 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.

• 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.