Hi,
I've attempted to install a whole antivirus software onto a 1gb image/ram disk(with "save data to image" enabled), just to see if there's any performance boost.
After my initial install everything ran fine and it behaves completely normal. However, the trouble starts after I reboot my pc (the ramdisk mounted automatically). Firstly, the Avast icon still shows up in the icon tray at startup, but with a red exclamation. When I open it it says protections disabled, and when I attempt to turn it on, it would freeze a bit then redundantly ask me if I want to disable protection, though it already was. If I try to run a scan it would not start.
Going into the Avast install directory and clicking around a bit, I realized none of the exe files would execute(maybe they're not supposed to to begin with, I'm not sure). I messed around a bit giving them all administrative access, but to no avail.
Since the program now pretty much does nothing except sit in the icon tray, I tried to uninstall it via windows uninstaller. It failed then said something along the lines of "The installation program does not pass avast self-defense/verification test" or something like that. I tried unmounting the ram disk first, but it would just allow me to remove the program from the list without actually uninstalling.
My next attempt was to use windows recovery to roll back to an earlier date. And what surprised me was, first, after rollback, it gave me an error saying something avast related in the system32 folder could not be located..or something like that, and asked me to attempt recovery again. I did...then it lead me to the longest recovery attempt where it gets stuck on the "rebooting..." message for hours. I did not think it would finish and hard-rebooted.
Now any time I try to reboot the pc it will get stuck on the "rebooting..." message without ever completing a reboot.
Anyways, I performed a full reinstall just for the heck of it. But I'm actually still curious on whether it would've worked if I had enabled the "Hard disk emulation" option. Anyone has any ideas on this topic, and what actually happened to Avast?