Installing Avast antivirus onto RAM disk

Started by pokkop

pokkop

Installing Avast antivirus onto RAM disk   15 April 2014, 01:56

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?
SoftPerfect Support forum - Andrew avatar image

Re: Installing Avast antivirus onto ram disk   15 April 2014, 11:26

I guess it would not have worked in either case.

Antivirus products are very complex, usually they comprise of low-level interconnected components such as drivers and one or more high level services.

If a RAM is mounted at a later stage in the boot process than the Avast actually tries to initialise, it would fail. It may fail for other reasons as well, but this the main one I can think of.

Even if it had worked, it would not really provide any performance gains. I suggest to google for best practices how to use a RAM disk. Typically it's moving Windows temp folders to it, browser caches and all other I/O that is temporary in nature.
Scriptinator

Re: Installing Avast antivirus onto RAM disk   01 April 2016, 10:53

I installed the whole Avira antivirus to my RAM disk and it works great.

I use imDisk RAM disk.

I created a registry key to initialize the RAM disk and then copy contents to the RAM disk on startup, and a shutdown script to copy contents from the RAM disk back to a folder on the hard disk during shutdown.

In services, go to each Avira service and check "Allow service to interact with desktop". If you don't, you'll always get the closed umbrella.

I tried to do the same with Comodo antivirus, but had no success.

Hope this helps.
Scriptinator

Re: Installing Avast antivirus onto RAM disk   01 April 2016, 11:41

I just tested SoftPerfect RAM Disk and must say that it is impressive.

I've switched over to using SoftPerfect RAM Disk to see how it holds up over time.

Sometimes you can find a solution faster if you try the forum search, have a look at the knowledge base, or check the software user manual to see if your question has already been answered.

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