How to access RamDisk Drive from non Admin user account on Windows XP

Question

I am successfully able to create/access a Ram disk drive of 20MB using the RAMDISK sample in WinDDK using my admin account.

However when i login as non-admin user on the same machine i get an access denied error on double clicking on the same Ram drive to access it. Please anyone here could tell how give access to all user to this drive.

Answer 1

I have found the below sample posted on Microsoft support site that creates the Ramdisk drive which is accesable through non-admin accounts. It works on 2000, xp, win7. Havent tried on Vista. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257405

Answer 2

I can't imagine why Microsoft would release the ramdisk sample without setting its permissions, but they did... so it defaults to Admin-only permissions.

You'll need to call WdfDeviceInitAssignSDDLString() from within RamDiskEvtDeviceAdd(), after the call to WdfDeviceInitAssignName() and before the call to WdfDeviceCreate(). Note that this function is only available if you link against wdmsec.lib, which you'll need to add to the "sources" file. And you'll probably want to use one of the ACL definition strings in wdmsec.h, though you could write your own if you care to learn its structure.

Another issue with the Microsoft ramdisk sample driver is that it won't work above 32MB (indeed, it will only work for up to 31.99 MB) because the code doesn't handle overflow of the 16-bit bootSector->bsSectors; beyond 0x0000FFFF total sectors, it should set bootSector->bsSectors to zero and use the 32-bit bootSector->bsHugeSectors instead.

Note that after fixing the bootSector->bsHugeSectors issue, you're setting yourself up to run out of nonpaged kernel memory if you're not careful... though in most cases you're safe up to 96MB since in most (modern) cases your WinXP system has 128MB of nonpaged kernel memory available. Just don't forget that your ramdisk driver isn't the only thing that uses the nonpaged pool.