Current version 1.9.2 built 17 December 2014
ImDisk is a virtual disk driver for Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1 or Windows Server 2003/2008/2012. 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.
An additional driver, awealloc, in this install package supports memory allocation beyond 4 GB limit on 32 bit Windows through address window extension, AWE.
The ImDisk driver supports forwarding I/O requests to third-party image file format handlers or to services on other computers on the network. This makes it possible to boot a machine with NTFS partitions with a 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 with a faulty NTFS partition. This way you can recover information and even run chkdsk on drives on machines where Windows does not boot. There are also instructions about how to use devio under Windows on Claus Valca's blog.
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 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
The install package now automatically starts the driver at end of setup
This means that no additional actions should be required before using ImDisk, even on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 or Windows 8 with UAC turned on. Reviewed by Tekzilla
There is a Tekzilla review of ImDisk Toolkit on Youtube: 5/5 star rating by Programosy.pl and Editor's Choice by Instalki.pl. Certified free from virus and malware by SoftPedia.
ImDisk Toolkit
The ImDisk Toolkit is a complete package that adds a more modern and intuitive user interface to ImDisk. ImDisk Toolkit offers features like automated creation of memory disks at system startup and mounting many different image file formats. It is developed and maintained by user "v77" at the reboot.pro forum. It is available for
download here.
64 bit compatibility
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 difference however, is that the 64-bit versions do not have any practical size limits for virtual disks backed by memory.
Driver files are digitally signed with a certificate trusted by Microsoft.
This means that ImDisk works on Windows Vista and later without running in 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 and .NET/COM API library, is available as a 7-zip compressed file
here (206.7 KB). The Windows driver, command line tool and Control Panel applet parts of the source code can be built in the Windows 2000 build environment in the latest WDK and the *nix parts can be built with for example gcc. .NET components are built in Visual Studio 2010, you can use Visual Basic Express 2010 if you want to view and modify the source code in a free version of Visual Studio.
API
API functions are available for C/C++, COM and .NET clients. 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. Read inc\imdisk.h in source archive for documentation about C/C++ usage. If you would like information about how to write compatible server-end software in C/C++ you can take a look at the I/O packet structures in inc\imdproxy.h.
A class library DLL for COM and .NET developers is available as a separate wrapper DLL.
You can download that DLL here or an
archive including the actual DLL along with import libraries and registry files for COM usage here.
Look here for on-line documentation about .NET API. There are also, as usual, xml files with method/parameter descriptions available to each assembly file.
License
I have received some e-mails with questions whether 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. More specifically, the driver code related to floppy emulation. Some of the driver code is also ported to Windows NT from the FreeBSD 'md' driver.
This means that if you modify the code and/or include it in your own product, it all needs to be redistributed under GPL, including source code. If you wish to avoid GPL requirements, such as the need to redistribute source code, you would therefore need to remove all floppy emulation related code from the driver. I will be happy to do such modifications for you to make the code comply with your license requirements. Just send me an e-mail!
Questions?
There is a sub-forum at Reboot.pro for discussions about ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver and other tools published here.Answers to frequently asked questions are collected in this thread.
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