In my experience, allocating from the top of xms is the better experience.

I've used xmsdsk with 2gb allocated just fine with win98. In fact, win98 was running from inside the ramdisk.

Per the readme, you should start xmsdsk from autoexec.bat, to avoid win9x screaming at you.

Use the /t flag to allocate from the top of xms, instead of the bottom. Windows handles this better, as functionally it's more like not having memory to allocate. (Eg, small ram size installed).

In my cases, I used xmsdsk from autoexec.bat booted from a cdrom, before starting mscdex, on a diskless system. This gave the ramdisk drive C, and the cdrom drive D. I copied a drivespace3 cvf to the ramdisk from the cdrom, used attrib to remove readonly and set hidden, mounted it with 'scandisk /mount', then started windows manually by running win.com

Ran beautifully and crazy fast.

Thank you. I can copy and probably am copying some data to the RAM drive upon startup and use them from there. I do similar on Win11/64 and a Win7/64 laptops and used to on a broken DOS laptop. I really want a Win98-based RAM drive so I can preserve its contents upon shut down but may be better off with a DOS-based one.

In this case, there is a shutdown batch file that runs when win9x shuts down.

You can use that with the cvf trick I used, to preserve the entire volume in one file copy operation.

The trick is to exit windows with 'msdos mode', which runs dosstart.bat

"Restart in MS-DOS Mode" Batch File Question

You can use attrib, copy, et al, to backup the cvf on shutdown this way.

(Normal shutdown would not preserve.)

--

The DOWNSIDE (and its a big one), is that drvspace.bin gobbles up 64k of upper memory, and is needed to mount drivespace3 cvf containers.

I was making a 'guaranteed clean' antivirus bootcd for dealing with CIH infections. I didnt care about dos memory.

If you're talking about the DOSSTART.BAT file, I'm aware of that. If I'm using a DOS-based RAM drive, I'd rather copy or extract the files to the drive at startup and add new files to the originals as needed.

then autoexec.bat and xcopy with appropriate flags for 'assume yes' 'copy all files and folders, even empty ones', and 'assume overwrite' set, should do the trick for you.

allocate from the top, as stated, and load xmsdsk from autoexec.bat with loadhigh.

Boot time will just drag on and on while initial file copy happens.

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dos versions of pkzip and pkunzip might be able to selectively preserve only changed files, and might be faster than xcopy.

See command line reference here for dos pkzip.

https://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/resources/gui … ware/pkzip.html

'freshen' is the feature you'd use.

I can do that, but I don't know why I need to "assume yes," as the RAM drive would be empty before the copy. I'd prefer to keep the original compressed and compress individual files to it as needed, i.e. programs or anything that would benefit from a RAM drive. Thank you.

Harry Potter wrote on 2025-06-03, 14:36:

I can do that, but I don't know why I need to "assume yes," as the RAM drive would be empty before the copy. I'd prefer to keep the original compressed and compress individual files to it as needed, i.e. programs or anything that would benefit from a RAM drive. Thank you.

It's for the automated copy from the ramdisk, back to disk.

Pkzip and pkunzip might work better for you, but i'd keep a rotating backup file for the archive.

I'd use IF EXIST ... blocks to check what backup zips exist, delete the oldest, rename the series except the newest two, copy the newest into the second newest, then do the freshen.

Something like...

1
2IF EXIST C:\zips\back1.zip (
3    IF EXIST C:\zips\back2.zip (
4     REM rotate backup 
5      del C:\zips\back2.zip
6       ren c:\zips\back1.zip C:\zips\back2.zip
7       Copy c:\zips\back2.zip c:\zips\back1.zip
8      REM freshen archive
9      pkzip -add=freshen D:\*.* C:\zips\back1.zip
10   ) ELSE (
11       REM create rotated backup
12       Copy c:\zips\back1.zip c:\zips\back2.zip
13       REM freshen archive
14       pkzip -add=freshen D:\*.* C:\zips\back1.zip
15   )
16) ELSE (
17    REM create initial backup
18    pkzip -add=all D:\*.* C:\zips\back1.zip
19)
20

I prefer using DOSRAR than PKZip, as it provides a better compression ratio. Thank you for your suggestions. 😀

There's dos rar tools as well, but I dont know how friendly rar is to freshening.

I don't know what dos rar tools are, but I believe the a switch will add to an archive file. I don't think I can add to a folder in the archive file in either, though. 🙁

Harry Potter wrote on 2025-06-03, 15:02:

I don't know what dos rar tools are, but I believe the a switch will add to an archive file. I don't think I can add to a folder in the archive file in either, though. 🙁

With -r it should be able to add files with their relative paths, so if the files are in a subfolder before compression, they'll appear in that subfolder inside the archive.
At least that's how I remember it, I don't have RAR at hand.

Thank you, but I'm wondering if I can add to a specific path in the archive file.

I arrived at my mother's house yesterday, but the internet wasn't working until just now. 🙁 I reenabled the RAM drive and added the /t switch, but when I tried to access it, the computer just crashed with an Exception error. 🙁 I tried to reinstall the Windows RAM drive I had. It said it couldn't find the registry keys. 🙁 I reinstalled it, but the drive letter didn't appear in Explorer. 🙁 I could use another RAM drive.

BTW, I want to use .iso files. I reinstalled Daemon and had to change the driver names. The extra drive letter for the emulated CD drive is present, but I can't figure out how to mount an .iso file. Double-clicking the icon on the desktop does nothing. Dragging a file onto the icon gave me an error regarding the command line.

I just found out why the RAM drive wasn't working: I forgot to enable the line in the CONFIG.SYS file for UMBPCI. I fixed that, but then Windows crashed twice. I downloaded SRDSK and am working on installing it.

Fixed it! The culprit was SETVER.EXE, not the RAM drive. 😀