1. Ok, I have identified a big bug which fortunately I can describe the cause of EXACTLY. You have this PROFILES utility that runs at boot time and which creates the "documents and settings" empty directory tree on the ram drive apparently required by many programs to load. HOWEVER, when you clear the ram drive, this profiles tree is REMOVED and apparently, is NOT reconstituted, thereby causing programs such as antivir to crash if run AGAIN because the profile directory tree is GONE and they consequently crash. Now the assumption here, is that I have not created or built the files correctly because it seems improbable that you would not notice a HUGE bug like this. But maybe so!

2. It appears that SETRES under the limited bootcd environment cannot run with color depth/ resolution specifications, therefore I have removed them from the geoshell.cmd and it runs fine in the default resolutions.

3. It would be a really wise idea when creating your plugins tree, to label which plugins are MANDATORY because this is not apparent. Because you can deactivate any plugin, and I do this frequently because there is much too much offered that I don't want, I want to run as lean as possible, so I deactivate all over the place without realizing some plugins are really system plugins (like the one that creates the profile tree above) and deactivating them creates severe malfunction. I have noticed many comments on the forums from users that are clearly, the result of the inactivating of mandatory plugins without realizing it. So, may I suggest that you label the pertinent ones as DO NOT DISABLE, and you will immediately end a huge chunk of user issues and grief!!

No, you're not doing anyting wrong. The profiles directory tree doesn't get properly reconstructed after clearing the ramdrive in the current release but it's fixed in the next version that will hopefully be released soon.

Tom

Here's a quick fix for the clean ramdrive problem...

pebuilder313\plugin\nu2menu\ClearRAMdrv.cmd

This is my fix for the clean ramdrive problem, a bit less cryptic:

ClearRamDrv.cmd


Other possibility is to call "profiles.exe" within the clearramdrv.cmd.

philon

Yup, all of this has been addressed and will be fixed in the next release.

What's wrong with being "CRYPTIC"?

HMM, well yes it's less "CRYPTIC", but does not solve the problem of removing active files that are being used by the system like the eventlogs & registered folders that are "locked" by windows when the DLL's get registered at boot time.

Formating the ramdrive to remove files is the wrong approach to anything involving "system folders".

I have ALL you guys beat with the solution to the ramdrive lost profile directory problem.
HERE IT IS:

In the file ClearRAMdrv.cmd, in the NU2Menu plugin,
I have added the following 2 lines:

cd %windir%\system32
profiles

(which builds the directory profile at boot time)
WORKS GREAT !!!!!!!!

Both hilander999's solution (a paraglider script) and philon's suggestion of calling profiles.exe from ClearRAMdrv.cmd are OK solutions... I noticed this bug quite some time ago and fixed it using a similar solution - looks like I probably should have mentioned it earlier... But in the meantime:

Currently, UBCD4Win uses profiles.exe written by tonedeaf from 911cd.net (THREAD); and while it works well, it is an AutoIT compiled script (then UPX'd - SOURCE). Since I'm not a programmer, but like the option of customizing PE to my liking, I decided to use my own method of "profiles" creation. It is easy and customizable, and addresses some of the shortcomings I find with the above solutions. This is just my solution among, I'm sure, many.

The shortcomings are as I see them (albeit minor in my opinion):

• as previously mentioned, tonedeaf's RAMProfiles plugin is written with AutoIT, making it difficult for the non-programmer to customize. Of even less importance, but nonetheless present, is it's size - due to the nature of an AutoIT compilation, the EXE is 275kb uncompressed and 144kb compressed.
  
• with paraglider's script, while it elegantly deletes everything in the RAMDrive except files located in Documents and Settings (the "profiles"), unfortunately, many programs copy files to Documents and Settings, robbing you of potentially precious RAMDrive space.

This is why I continue to support the notion of formatting the RAMDrive and recreating the profiles. My "personal-use" method involves only a SFX_RAR file to create the Documents and Settings folders in the RAMDrive and registry entries. The SFX_RAR is 55kb.

Here are some real-world examples of why I believe formatting the RAMDrive is the superior option:

Immediately after booting PE I checked the size of my RAMDrive and found the following:



The only thing occupying the RAMDrive are folders (why almost 4.4MB are "used" is still a mystery to me - more on that later)

I decided to run many of the apps that use the RAMDrive on my personal build and test from there... here is a screenshot of my RAMDrive showing what apps I ran.



Here is the amount of spaced used by the apps in the RAMDrive:



I then closed all the apps and ran paraglider's script deleting everything but what is occupied in Documents and Settings. As you can see, 7.5MB of RAMDrive space remains occupied:



I then formatted b:\ with ClearRAMdrv.cmd, and got the following results:



As you can see, the "delete everything but Documets and Settings" script left many files in the "profiles" robbing me of about 5MB of RAMDrive space.

Admittedly, the amount of space saved with such a sizeable RAMDrive is negligible, not everyone or every machine has this luxury - so the point ought to be that, when clearing the RAMDrive, it ought to free up as much space as possible.

The lines in my ClearRAMdrv.cmd are simply:
format %ramdrv% /FS:NTFS /V:RAMDisk /Q /C /x /FORCE
start/wait %systemroot%\system32\Documents.and.Settings_SFX.exe
exit

Essentially, my Documents.and.Settings_SFX.exe simply replaces profiles.exe.

@MattInLA:

I don't understand your last post - I added your lines:

cd %windir%\system32
profiles

to ClearRAMdrv1.cmd (a file made for testing), and ran it after booting to PE with no results.

ClearRAMdrv.cmd is not called on during or after boot, so I'm not clear what these lines could accomplish. Perhaps you are referring to something I'm missing...

DW

NOTE: Since I don't have access to any "beta" sections, I am unaware of any potential changes which might be better than the solution I've used for my personal builds. My apologies for not solving this sooner - immediately after the ClearRAMdrv plugin was encorporated into UBCD4Win, I noticed and fixed the bug - but forgot about it and never mentioned my results. Should there be interest after examining any beta versions, I'll consider posting my plugin. It varies only slightly from the current plugin but fixes the problem.

Those two lines are invoked when I manually clear the ram drive as a menu option. (I mean there is no other way to clear the ramdrive then through a start menu selection)

OK, now I understand. I did the same thing then during my test - I invoked it from the menu after booting to PE - with no results, other than the RAMDrive was formatted but no profiles created. The RAMDrive was completely empty.

Here is a screenshot from within PE showing the error message:



Perhaps you could post a similar screenshot showing your success?

DW

Luckily the project has a few "programmers". We are working hard on a solution for this. It's almost complete, just need to decide on a few things and beta test it more.

Version 3.0 of the project will show off a lot of new awesome things and fixes several "deep" problems within previous releases of the project. We should have it out soon!

Digiwiz! Well there's your answer right there! It cannot find the profiles executable! LOOK AT YOUR OUTPUT! Are you using %windir% so it can find the drive/directory? This works PERFECTLY and it's so simple. Do it EXACTLY as I explained it.

Again, I URGE you to label mandatory plugins as such so you will know not to disable them.

There is a plan for that. However, you have to understand that your request would take EXTENSIVE testing. We have a limited amount of beta testers. We are not commercial, just a bunch of nice guys spending some of our free time trying to help everyone. There are "tags" being setup that should help a bit. I've also been toying with an idea to "tag" plugins that need to be disabled when building with 2k3.

Getting back to the real topic at hand. The next release of the project will handle this differently and will be setup different. We have a modified "profiles" plugin that really isn't a profiles plugin anymore because it does so much more. There are several other plugins that are heavily modified because they caused errors or conflicts with other processes. I sometimes wish the users of the project understood how much goes into developing and testing the project.

Regarding resizing the ramdrive,
This probably should only be done during startup as if any programs are locking files or folders the resize will fail. (So option to re size can be left off menu)

I have no problem with 1 MB ramdrive holding the folders needed for my profile
The files using space are (1) bginfo.bmp
the size of this file depends on the resolution selected for bginfo
If I select 256 colours the file is less than 50k (resolution dependant)
It used to be 3.7 MB before I changed the bginfo setting

(2) If you use sherpya's Firefox plugin some parts of plugin are sent to UserProfile ... so this will not work with only 1MB

I need option for 1MB ramdrive for old PC with 64MB RAM. ubcd4win will work with 64MB RAM, but my current non ubcd4win build will not

regards
Mike Barnes

This file can be safely deleted after the image is loaded with no side effects.

While you're discussing graphic modes, note that my ORIGINAL posting for this whole huge chain of forum mail mentions that for ME, SETRES with color depth setting DOES NOT WORK, at least on my Dell using the Extreme graphics chipset by intel. I modified the SETRES.exe batch files DELETING all references to color depth which now works....somewhat. Your comments on all this are appreciated.
-Matt