Prevent Windows from forcing reboots before image flush
4 posts · Closed
Hi,
This morning I woke up to a computer that was turned on - "oh great, Windows Update resumed from standby again, and even did it in spite of me turning off wake timers". That would have been a minor annoyance to start the day with; unfortunately, it also turned out the image file backing my persistent RAM disk had been corrupted, and I had forgotten to add the folders on it I cared about to my backup set.
Iirc I had a 3GB image size, but the file was 2.756.941.312 bytes, so we're probably seeing a case of Windows forcefully shutting down before RAM Disk has a chance to flush the image fully to disk...
Is there anything you can do to prevent Windows from doing the forceful reboot before the image file has been properly written to disk? I'd hate for this to happen another time :(
Win10 x64, now running 1709/16299.547 after the update. SoftPerfect RAM Disk 4.0.4 before, now updated to 4.0.7.
Unfortunately Windows 10 is somewhat "cruel" with applications, services and even drivers that run on it. I guess Microsoft designed it this way to make such slow and heavy system appear to work faster by killing running tasks after a rather short timeout.
There is a relevant registry setting that applies to services, though I am not sure if it works for drivers too:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WaitToKillServiceTimeout
It is the time in milliseconds before the system starts killing services. Again, this may or may not work for drivers, but it could since drivers are started and stopped by the service control manager (SCM).
Other than that, a frequent backup is a must. My experience suggests things can go wrong anytime for various reasons, from a software bug (bug) to a physically dead hard drive.
Or you could edit group policies to tell windows that "your organisation is managing updates" - problem solved.
As this solves your problem, you are now in control to decide when updates are installed, giving you all the time you need to shutdown your ramdisk.
The issue with image files occasionally corrupted on shutdown was fixed in version 4.3.2 onward.