Windows 8 has a RAMDisk driver included but I don't know how to enable it, the path is: C:\windows\system32\DriverStore\FileRepository\ramdisk.inf_amd64_d76914a4306b4196 18.02.2012 00:38 4.010 ramdisk.inf 18.02.2012 05:36 28.160 ramdisk.sys If you add this driver a new device tree called RAMDisk shows up, but under drives I can't see a new volume. Does anyone have experience how to enable this RAMDrive? I have 16GB RAM, so I'd really like to do that.
That's just what Windows Embedded's write filters are for. The filter can be set to protect a partition and creates an overlay of that partition in RAM. Any writes going to the partition are only performed on the overlay, so the partition appears writable, but the writes are discarded on reboot. This makes it possible to boot from entirely read-only disks as well. You can also configure exceptions so that certain directories or registry paths do get written do disk. I believe it has been possible to also get the write filters to work in the regular Windows editions, so there might be a way for Windows 8 as well. If you want to look into it, the terms to look for are EWF (Enhanced Write Filter) and FBWF (File-based Write Filter), for the write filters included in Windows Embedded Standard 7. WES8 includes a new write filter (UWF, Unified Write Filter), which supersedes EWF and FBWF.