volume cannot be formated after ramdisk creation

Ramdisk for Windows and mounting of image files

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volume cannot be formated after ramdisk creation

Forum: General Discussion

Creator: isidroco

Created: 2025-10-05

Updated: 2025-10-06

isidroco - 2025-10-05

under latest win10, tried creating a new ramdisk (43Gb, NTFS, 32k cluster, 4k sector sz, allocate dynamic), I just uninstalled IMDisk thinking that it may be the cause, but same issue remains:
"Error, the volume cannot be formatted"
Disk is created, but I have to manually format.

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v77 - 2025-10-05

Thanks for the report. Are you using the latest version?

Could you please try without the dynamic allocation? You can reduce the ramdisk size, it does not matter.
After that, could you please try the following command in an elevated command prompt and from the installation folder?
aim_ll.exe -a -s 100M -p "/fs:NTFS /q /y"

For now, I assume this is the usual bug, that is, Windows cannot find the created volume, and therefore there is nothing to format.
If it is confirmed, this bug is really a nightmare. Even Olof has found nothing about that.
And of course, I cannot reproduce it.

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isidroco - 2025-10-06

Without dynamic allocation works ok. Your command created a new small RamDisk without any issues. Unfortunatelly Dynamic Allocation is essential as sometimes I need huge ramdisk to process all video/ or Virtual Machines in RAMDISK . And other times I need huge RAM to use 7zip at extreme settings: dynamic allocation saves me making constant changes.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that RamDisk was not recreated after boot, found out that my w10 didn't had net framework 4.8 (component may be excluded from install). And AIMtoolkit didn't complain about framework missing as it did in win7, maybe you should add that check.
Once framework was installed, RamDisk was recreated as expected.

Last edit: isidroco 2025-10-06

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isidroco - 2025-10-06

New tests: Error only occur when cluster size is bigger than 4k. Any lower size works ok too. But 8k to 64k gives: Can't format.

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isidroco - 2025-10-06

One last drawback, and I'm forced to return to IMDisk: Ghost64 or Ghost32 exits on start when a RamDisk made by AIMtoolkit is present. I usually use system images with ghost to and from RAMdisks, so in spite trying to be future proof, I'll stick with what it woks ... :(

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v77 - 2025-10-06

Thanks for your tests.
Ramdisks do not use .NET Framework.
All that is really weird. The next version should handle better some unlikely errors but... this is really not satisfactory.

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isidroco - 2025-10-06

About RAMdisk not recreated, that was on my first attemp (when it didn't format it). Not sure all things I changed including installing .NET framework, so maybe it was something unrelated, and couldn't repeat the failure. Unfortunately GHOST32 or GHOST64 just makes a dump and exits with no messages or hints about what happened. At least I could isolate the other problem to Cluster Size.

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- Olof Lagerkvist - 2025-10-06
  
  I could probably do some research on the issue with Ghost. Is it possible to download a trial version or something of Ghost somewhere?
  
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