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havenvanheusen edited this page Jul 31, 2017 · 1 revision

Welcome to the RAMDiskCopy2 wiki!

A preview of RAMDiskCopy2's main interface

When you first start up RAMDiskCopy2, it'll bug you letting you know that things go wrong from time to time and I can't predict all of the scenarios, so you use it at your own risk (more or less). If that freaks you out or you're unprepared to clean up your files after something unexpected happens, you're given an opportunity to get out while you can. If you're cool with that, just click the right button and move along. Or you can even check the box that stops it from showing itself again, though if your little brother fires it up and doesn't see it there's no other means to scare him away from using it.

Using RAMDiskCopy is pretty straight-forward though. Simply start at the top with what you'd like to do starting with adding files simply by clicking the Choose Files button or dragging them onto the window. If you add folders, RAMDiskCopy2 will reject them, so don't do that. I mean, you can try, but nothing will happen.

If you added any files that you don't want to add to the RAMDisk or that you've added accidentally or whatever other reasons abound, select it or them and click Remove Selected Files and away they go.

The Available RAM (In MB): section will tell you... you guessed it. How much RAM you currently have available. This will update once a second so it should give a pretty steady view of how big your RAMDisk can be. A good idea would be to launch all the stuff you would normally have open and see how much would then be available. Make sure to close your programs before you make the RAMDisk though. That just sounds like a bad idea.

The Total Files Size (In MB): gets a pretty accurate read on how big the files are that you're planning on dropping into your RAMDrive. It doesn't calculate the exact file size, so it'll be a little off. I might fix this later on if there's a big enough request for it, but it'll probably add to the processing time when adding a lot of files.

RAMDisk Size (In MB): is where you tell it how big you want the drive to be. And don't try putting something silly in there like HAVEN IS A BIG DUMB STUPID HEAD because, even though I'm aware of that, I've restricted it to numbers only. 80085 works though, so long as you have enough RAM for it. And yes, don't worry, it won't try and make a RAM disk larger than the amount of free RAM.

RAMDisk Drive Letter: will populate with all the available drive letters your system isn't using and starts you off with the last one. (In my case, that's Y)

Once you've got all that squared away, click the Create RAMDisk button and the program goes to town. I think it's fun to watch it copy the files and create the reparse points so feel free to open up your RAMDisk in Windows Explorer and watch it work.

In this step, it does a few things. If you're not interested in the inner workings, feel free to skip this paragraph. First, it fires up ImDisk.exe from the ImDisk Toolkit (Which I'd assume you'd have installed if you made it this far since RAMDiskCopy2 checks to make sure that you have it installed first) to create your RAMDisk. It then calls up format.com to format the RAMDisk in ExFAT (chosen because I wanted to keep things simple and most benchmarks show that it works fastest for most RAMDisks). Once that's completed, it checks to make sure that it can write to the drive (Just in case anything goes wrong here) then starts to copy the files you've added to the RAMDisk (with a folder structure similar to how you had it in its original location) adding a ".old" to the end of their original filename and leaving a reparse point in its wake pointing to the new location on the RAMDisk so your programs will be none the wiser.

So now it's 2 AM and you realize that you have to work tomorrow so it's time to close things down. If you try closing RAMDiskCopy2 while a RAMDisk it created is still around, it'll warn you that bad things will happen (like having to clean up all those renamed files and reparse points on your own) so instead you'll click the Remove RAMDisk button.

More inner workings here, so feel free to skip ahead. This won't take long, though. Here, it works in reverse by deleting the reparse points then renaming the files back to their original name by removing the .old from them (it only pays attention to the files in your list, though, so don't get any ideas) then getting rid of the RAMDisk. Hope you weren't using that for anything you wanted to keep cause it's gone now.

Since it worked so well and there were so many files to go digging around for that one game that can't seem to keep all its files in one directory, it's probably a good idea to click the Save Profile button and save the settings for this particular RAMDisk setup. Open up where you'd like to save the files (I like having a folder just for these guys) and name it. It'll create two files, one with the paths to the files you were using (.RDC2) and the RAMDisk size and letter you were using (.var).

Now, using the Load Profile button, the next time you fire up RAMDiskCopy2, simply locate the .RDC2 file you saved from before and click Create RAMDisk and you're all set to do it again! That was easy!

While you're there, go ahead and click the About.. button. It'll give you a few links including the Adf.ly link so that you can watch an ad to send me a 1/20th of a penny or so for my efforts.

Enjoy!

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