Merry Christmas Everyone and a Question!

As it says - Merry Christmas to Everyone!

Ok. I had something kind-of strange happen and I had a question about it. I'm posting it here because I don't know if this would fall under this area or not so in the vain hope it is supposed to be here - I'm posting here.

I installed 8GB of memory on my laptop a while back. My system is a 32bit system so only 4GB can be seen but all 8GB can be used. The other 4GB can be used as a virtual disk. So I looked around and found ImDisk. A free virtual disk piece of software. I installed the software but never got around to setting up the virtual disk. Then we got hacked and loss of job - got new job (contract) - and now I'm off of that contract - so no job again. Anyway - I decided to actually set up the ImDisk stuff.

That was when I got a strange message. I decided to make the virtual disk drive have the letter Z. ImDisk came back with "You already have a drive using the letter Z". I looked - no drive Z but ImDisk insists it is there. So I did some research and found out that you can hide disk drives. So I went and looked in the registry like it said for "NoDrive", found both entries, they are set to zero like they are supposed to be (so all drives show). But ImDisk insists there is a disk drive using the letter Z.

So my question is - is it possible to have a virtual disk of some sort that is using a drive letter but does not show up? I'm wondering if (and yes this is paranoia raising its ugly head) it is possible for a hacker to create a program that loads in a virtual drive from which they can come and go on your system as they please. Sort of like a subsystem disk (or maybe a virtual system kind of thing?).

This could just be a limitation to ImDisk but from what I've read - it should be able to create a Z disk without any kind of a problem. So - there it is. What do you guys think? Malware, Hackerware, unknown weirdness - what?

As an aside - If you decide to buy an internal hard drive and you put it in to a CoolMax external hard drive case - there is a good chance the case will overheat your disk drive. I just bought a 2TB Seagate drive and was moving all of my videos over to it when it crashed. The case was burning hot. The problem is that CoolMax made the case fit so snugly around the disk drive that there isn't any room for heat to dissipate. I had to take the front cover off of the unit, let it cool down, and now I'm trying to recover the 2,000 some odd video files I had just put on to the disk drive. I've already written to CoolMax and they thanked me for the info - but I'm SOL on the drive and stuff. Luckily, Seagate drives are fairly hardy and I am s-l-o-w-l-y recovering my files. I also ordered two external Seagate USB drives which will be here soon and I can then just put everything onto them. :-/

Anyway - thanks in advance for any thoughts on this matter.

 

I don't know, but does this have anything to do with the drive Z: issue you're having?

http://reboot.pro/topic/17989-getti...pen-drive-for-direct-access-access-is-denied/

Maybe this happened on an earlier version of ImDisk and the error message was different?

My memory is totally failing on this, but I just have a glimmer of a memory of a reason for a Z: drive existing with Windows. Maybe someone can help. If it's supposed to be there, I guess there could still be protection against creation of an invisible drive in the hard drive drivers and/or in Windows. Don't know about this...

Found something in a DosBox forum about drive Z. I've used DosBox, and I seem to recall that it opens with the Z: drive by default. I wonder if this has something to do with 16 bit support. DosBox is used for playing old 16 bit games and running other old 16 bit programs.

Here is a video that shows in the opening what DosBox looks like when it is opened:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAWiUAGCphQ

As you can see, the sound settings for the DosBox environment are loaded into the Drive Z: environment. That's what causes me to think that maybe the fact that drive Z: isn't available has something to do with 16 bit support. Wonder if the old Dos remnants are there? :confused

Looking forward to finding out why you got the error message...

Oh yeah...as the thread says Merry Christmas to everyone!

 

I Wouldn't think a virtual OS would use the host OS drive letters. Can you see the Z: in disk management? Or, can you change to the Z: directory in command prompt?