No file system on the RAM drive

Started by Roest

No file system on the RAM drive   02 October 2019, 19:43

Was using the free version for a long time. Never any glitches. Having a 20GB RAM disk with saving to SSD every 10 minutes. Then a windows update happened and the RAM disk stopped working. Supposedly because of something Microsoft did. Well there was an update but no free version any more. No problem it's not expensive and it's worth the price.

Sadly the stability is gone. It now happens every other week that it tells me there is no file system on the RAM drive. Which probably means the save file got corrupted or, well, something else happened.

So to sum it up, my experience from going from free to paid is that I lose the content of my RAM disk every now and then.
SoftPerfect Support forum - Andrew avatar image

Re: No file system on the RAM drive   02 October 2019, 19:53

To be fair it's not necessarily RAM Disk's fault. New Windows 10 updates break things every now and then and the quality of Microsoft's releases is in decline. There are also known issues with PC clean-up programs like CleanMyPC and CCleaner. For some reason these seem to damage RAM disk image files.

If you are happy to do a bit troubleshooting, to find out why exactly you experience the issues, please submit a support ticker. Otherwise, depending on how you are using the disk, it might make sense not to use image files and create a volatile RAM disk instead. For example, for temporary files and browser caches, there is no point in keeping them between reboots.

Re: No file system on the RAM drive   02 October 2019, 20:17

Uff, how to put it politely? I know you're trying to be helpful but this is the most basic stuff and more annoying than helpful. Don't you think that when I'm using a ram disk and even paying for it, that I know what I'm doing? I'm using it for Visual Studio temp folders for large C++ projects where losing them means the project has to be rebuilt completely which takes several minutes. So yes, I'm not losing crucial data but time.
SoftPerfect Support forum - Andrew avatar image

Re: No file system on the RAM drive   02 October 2019, 20:32

As offered above, we can do a more detailed investigation and troubleshooting, to see if the problems you have do stem from RAM Disk and therefore can be fixed by us. There can be a number of reasons for stability issues, but because for vast majority of users RAM Disk works perfectly well, we do not have a ready answer as to why it is not the case for you. However, if for any reason you do not wish to provide more technical information for troubleshooting, we can offer you a full refund. You can then seek a product that suits your needs.

Re: No file system on the RAM drive   17 October 2019, 03:48

I've just started getting a similar problem. In the past 2 days, twice on reboot, I would find some of my startup programs would die because the temp directory is not on my A: ramdisk. I run several programs at boot time which create a few dozen temp files, and so they end up sprinkled on my desktop. I had not had any problems for months until just recently.

I believe it likely started with last weeks Microsoft patch on Tuesday. In fact, that update also broke my VMware player and so I had to back out 2 of the updates. I am now blocking Windows update until they have a fix for that.

As far as helping to debug this, is there a log file somewhere, since when I saw the ramdisk had no folders, I just rebooted and that cleared it up. I don't save the state of the ramdisk but have assigned temp over to the ramdisk, which is 25GB. I guess I could stop using the ramdisk for temp, but that would be a shame.

I didn't look too closely, just rebooted. How can I help you with this?
SoftPerfect Support forum - Ann avatar image
Ann

Re: No file system on the RAM drive   17 October 2019, 11:42

If you are using HDD Emulation, please try turning it off. In this case the RAM Disk will work through a much simpler routine, which may bypass the bug Microsoft introduced in their recent update.

If that doesn't solve the problem, please try a different file system on the RAM disk, e.g. exFAT instead of NTFS or vice versa.

In either case, please let us know of the outcome. Hopefully one of the above helps until Microsoft releases a bugfix.
Jan

Re: No file system on the RAM drive   18 October 2019, 11:15

Effing Microsoft! Every Windows 10 update causes goosebumps and cold sweat in anticipation 'what have they broken now?....' and brings more problems, more spying, and more unexplained traffic.

Anyway... whinging aside, disabling hard disk emulation may help. Mine is OFF, and so far I haven't experienced any problems with RAM disk after the latest Windows update. That is not to say MS didn't break other things, just not the RAM disk.

Re: No file system on the RAM drive   20 October 2019, 02:58

Although I haven't seen it re-occur since those 2 times, I turned off the HDD emulation. The only downside I can see is that I can't test it's speed with HDtune, as it doesn't show up in their device list. But that's no biggy as I only used that for bragging rights, to say how fast my disk was smile

Is exFAT completely compatible? Can I have arbitrarily big size files? I thought the FAT/FAT32 variety was limited one at 4 GB or so. I often copy large files there, such as a VMware vm folder with a 20 GB virtual disk file, so that I can try stuff and not worry about saving. Much better than copying to the SSD.

I guess I can just try it. Not much could go wrong smile I'll try that if I have any more problems.
SoftPerfect Support forum - Andrew avatar image

Re: No file system on the RAM drive   20 October 2019, 10:34

exFAT is quite different to FAT32 and has much higher limits. In particular, Maximum Volume Size is 128 PB and Maximum File Size is 16 EB. You will never hit those limits in practice ok, yes, thumb up

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