Thanks for creating such a useful and easy way to mount virtual disks. It makes things so much simpler.
However, please consider fixing the ImDisk Toolkit context menus so that they are applied more appropriately.
1. The Mount menu
This menu entry should only be added to the filetypes that are capable of opening in ImDisk (instead of it being added to every filetype on the user's system). Having an ImDisk mount menu added to things like text files, photos, music etc. makes no sense, and it just clutters up the user's ui with menus that don't work.
So instead of adding the ImDiskMountFile Registry key to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\* I would suggest doing the following:
Check for the existence of the filetypes that are compatible with ImDisk (for example by searching for the following keys)
For each of the above keys, read the key's (Default) value (which will tell you what the parent key is) and then add the Shell > ImDiskMountFile key to each of the specified parent keys.
As an example: on my system they are all associated with VirtualBox, so on my system the ImDisk mount context menu should be added to:
Doing this will ensure that the 'Mount as Virtual Disk' menu only gets added to the file types where it actually works.
I have already done this myself manually, and it works great! But it would be nice to have it set up like this by default, instead of having to manually edit the Registry after each install.
2. The Unmount menu
The Unmount Virtual Disk menu is currently added to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell which adds the unmount menu to every single disk on the user's system.
Again, it makes no sense having an unmount menu on your C:\ drive, on an optical disc drive, or in fact any disk drive that was not actually mounted by ImDisk in the first place (all it does is generate an error dialog).
I'm not a developer, so I couldn't work out how to manually fix this myself (because you'd need some way of keeping track of which drives were created by ImDisk). But for a developer it should be trivial to dynamically create a registry key for the specific drive (while it's being mounted by ImDisk) and then delete that same registry key when the virtual disk is unmounted (so that the same drive letter can be used by another device without having the redundant ImDisk unmount menu added to it).
I think these two changes would be a useful and well-received improvement for ImDisk Toolkit. Thanks.
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Hi,
Thanks for creating such a useful and easy way to mount virtual disks. It makes things so much simpler.
However, please consider fixing the ImDisk Toolkit context menus so that they are applied more appropriately.
1. The Mount menu
This menu entry should only be added to the filetypes that are capable of opening in ImDisk (instead of it being added to every filetype on the user's system). Having an ImDisk mount menu added to things like text files, photos, music etc. makes no sense, and it just clutters up the user's ui with menus that don't work.
So instead of adding the
ImDiskMountFileRegistry key toHKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*I would suggest doing the following:Check for the existence of the filetypes that are compatible with ImDisk (for example by searching for the following keys)
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.vdi
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.vhd
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.vhdx
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.vmdk
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.vxa
For each of the above keys, read the key's
(Default)value (which will tell you what the parent key is) and then add theShell>ImDiskMountFilekey to each of the specified parent keys.As an example: on my system they are all associated with VirtualBox, so on my system the ImDisk mount context menu should be added to:
progId_VirtualBox.Shell.vdi
progId_VirtualBox.Shell.vhd
progId_VirtualBox.Shell.vhdx
progId_VirtualBox.Shell.vmdk
Doing this will ensure that the 'Mount as Virtual Disk' menu only gets added to the file types where it actually works.
I have already done this myself manually, and it works great! But it would be nice to have it set up like this by default, instead of having to manually edit the Registry after each install.
2. The Unmount menu
The Unmount Virtual Disk menu is currently added to
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shellwhich adds the unmount menu to every single disk on the user's system.Again, it makes no sense having an unmount menu on your C:\ drive, on an optical disc drive, or in fact any disk drive that was not actually mounted by ImDisk in the first place (all it does is generate an error dialog).
I'm not a developer, so I couldn't work out how to manually fix this myself (because you'd need some way of keeping track of which drives were created by ImDisk). But for a developer it should be trivial to dynamically create a registry key for the specific drive (while it's being mounted by ImDisk) and then delete that same registry key when the virtual disk is unmounted (so that the same drive letter can be used by another device without having the redundant ImDisk unmount menu added to it).
I think these two changes would be a useful and well-received improvement for ImDisk Toolkit. Thanks.