Tools and utilities for Windows

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This page contains software 5 star rated and certified free from virus and malware by several freeware download sites.

You can use and redistribute the utilities and source code as you like, but remember to link back to this site or my e-mail address and always attach any following text file when you redistribute the utilities.

Some of my programs listed here are written many years ago and some are new, but most of them are now recompiled with MSVC++ compiler. Source code repositories for most of the things are available at Github.

Most of the programs here are compressed into ZIP files. ZIP files can be uncompressed in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 but earlier versions of Windows require a third-party ZIP tool, like the freeware 7-zip.

Please note! The applications are not tested in all possible environments. Neither authors nor distributors should be held responsible for what the applications actually do when they are used. If you have any ideas or modifications of source code you would like to share, please send me an e-mail. The tools published here are free with a very flexible open license. It is for example no problem to include any of the tools in a commercial product, as long as copyright information specifies that parts of the software belongs to me with some kind of reference, such as a web link, to https://www.ltr-data.se or this page. You do not need to make the source code available to your customers.

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Update history for this page (last update 11 November 2021)
ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver and Arsenal Image Mounter
Zero and Random Device Driver
Small native command line utilities
Small native utilities with graphical user interface
Small .NET command line utilities
Small .NET utilities with graphical user interface

Advice and consultation available

Need advice for programming projects or need a C/C++ or .NET C#/VB programmer? Advice how to optimize and simplify administration of computers and networks? Migrate old source code to modern development systems? Have some kind of hard-to-solve problem with computers, networks, drivers, applications etc? Maybe I can help you. Send me an e-mail: olof@ltr-data.se or MSN to ol@ltr-data.se or call me at +46 70 345 89 52 or Skype: live:ol. (I speak Swedish and English.)

Links to other projects

Many useful ports of GNU utilities to Win32 by Karl M Syring are available at UnxUtils Sourceforge site.

Many useful open source Windows NT driver projects by Bo Brantén.

Other useful tools and interesting source code using undocumented native API:s and an Ext2 filesystem for NT project by Adrey Shedel.

Click here for update history for this page (last update 11 November 2021)

All file dates are in ISO date format, YYYY-MM-DD. This makes the list easier to sort.

ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver

Current version 2.1.1 built 30 October 2021 packaged 07 November 2021

ImDisk is a virtual disk driver for Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10 and Windows Server 2003/2003 R2/2008/2008 R2/2012/2012 R2, 32 and 64 bit editions. It can create virtual hard disk, floppy or CD/DVD drives using image files or system memory. The install package installs a console-mode control program called imdisk.exe and a Control Panel applet. After install is finished, type imdisk without parameters for syntax help or double click the ImDisk icon in the Control Panel. It also adds a menu item in Windows Explorer so that you can right-click on a file to mount it as a virtual disk drive. Users of mdconfig in FreeBSD will probably be familiar with the command line syntax of imdisk.exe. The driver, service and control program can be uninstalled using the Add/Remove programs applet in the Control Panel. No reboot is required for installing or uninstalling.

An additional driver, awealloc, in this install package supports memory allocation beyond 4 GB limit on 32 bit Windows through address window extension, AWE.

The ImDisk driver supports forwarding I/O requests to third-party image file format handlers or to services on other computers on the network. This makes it possible to boot a machine with NTFS partitions with a Live-CD and use the included devio tool to let ImDisk on another computer running Windows on the network mount the NTFS partition on the machine with a faulty NTFS partition. This way you can recover information and even run chkdsk on drives on machines where Windows does not boot. There are also instructions about how to use devio under Windows on Claus Valca's blog.

Download screenshot - 43.5 KB
Download ImDisk install package, current stable version 2.1.1 packaged 07 November 2021 - 640.8 KB, works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. Security Notice: Always download setup packages to a new empty directory. To run a setup package from a directory with other unrelated files could be dangerous!
Download ImDisk install files for current stable version as a zip file built 30 October 2021 - 1.1 MB.
Download ImDisk install package, previous stable version 2.0.10 - 561.3 KB
Download devio tool for FreeBSD x86 built 22 January 2019 - 9.9 KB.
Download devio tool for FreeBSD x64 built 22 January 2019 - 14.5 KB.
Download devio tool for Linux x86 built 22 January 2019 - 11.0 KB.
Download devio tool for Linux x64 built 22 January 2019 - 10.4 KB.
Download devio tool for Windows x86 built 19 November 2018 - 10.7 KB.
Download devio tool for Windows x64 built 18 November 2018 - 21.6 KB.
Download devio tool for Windows ARM built 18 November 2018 - 19.8 KB.

About the install package

The install package is created using 7-zip sfx stubs and includes an .inf install script. No reboot is required after installing or uninstalling. The install package works on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Compatibility

ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver is designed to be a small, simple and yet powerful virtual disk driver. It runs on very old versions of Windows NT as well as modern Windows versions. However, because of this compatibility design and because it emulates disk volumes rather than complete disks, it is not always compatible with all applications and drivers. For instance, you cannot manage things like mount points, drive letters and similar for ImDisk drives using mountvol command line tool or in Disk Management in Windows. As another example, you cannot create or access shadow copies on ImDisk drives. So, applications that use similar Windows features as Disk Management dialog to enumerate disks and disk volumes to find disk properties like sector sizes and similar, might possibly not work as expected with ImDisk drives.

Arsenal Image Mounter - If you need full disk emulation support

If you need full disk emulation, including integration with Disk Management, Volume Shadow Copy Services, mountvol and diskpart command line tools as well as better compatibility with applications, we provide another open source virtual disk project, called Arsenal Image Mounter. It is published together with Arsenal Recon and is available for download here. It is available for non-commercial use under AGPL license. Commercial license options available, please contact Arsenal Recon for more information. Source code, command line tools, driver setup packages and similar for Arsenal Image Mounter are available on GitHub. The directory structure is desribed in this document.

Questions?

There is a sub-forum at Reboot.pro for discussions about ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver and other tools published here.
Answers to frequently asked questions are collected in this thread.

ImDisk Toolkit

The ImDisk Toolkit is a complete package that adds a more modern and intuitive user interface to ImDisk. ImDisk Toolkit offers features like automated creation of memory disks at system startup and mounting many different image file formats. It is developed and maintained by "v77". It is available for download here.

Reviewed by Tekzilla

There is a Tekzilla review of ImDisk Toolkit on Youtube:

5/5 star rating and certified free from virus and malware by several freeware download sites.

64 bit compatibility

64-bit versions share source code with the 32-bit version. All features and most limitations are the same in the 64-bit and 32-bit versions. One difference however, is that the 64-bit versions do not have any practical size limits for virtual disks backed by memory.

Driver files are digitally signed with a certificate trusted by Microsoft.

This means that ImDisk works on Windows Vista and later without running in testsigning mode.

Special note for Windows NT 3.51

The .inf file used in the install process is not compatible with Windows NT 3.51. To install on NT 3.51 you can extract the files in the packages using 7-zip and then manually create the driver keys in the registry or using a SCM control tool like sc.exe in the Windows NT Resource Kit. On later versions of Windows you just run the package and it will install everything automatically.

Source code

Source code for all of ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver, including the devio server-side tool, API libraries etc is available as a Github repository. Different parts of the source tree are built in different environments:

The Windows drivers, command line tool and Control Panel applet parts of the source code are built with WDK 7.1.0. There is a Makefile in the source tree root that builds imdisk.sys, awealloc.sys, imdisk.cpl, imdisk.exe and imdsksvc.exe when ran with nmake in WDK 7.1.0 command prompts.
The devio server side tool used with ImDisk clients in proxy mode, can be built with most *nix C++ compilers like gcc and similar. It can also be built in most Visual Studio/C++ command prompts. In all cases the devio binary you get supports listening for a tcp/ip connection and serving either a raw image file or a Microsoft vhd image file and parsing MBR partition tables to find offsets and sizes. When built with Visual Studio/C++ compilers, you will get a devio.exe that also supports listening for shared memory connections, the --dll switch to load custom dlls for accessing custom image file formats and features for auto-finding sizes of a physical devices.
The .NET library located in ImDiskNet subdirectory can be built using Visual Studio 2017 or higher, any edition with Visual Basic support.
There is also a Visual Studio solution with some project files for the driver, Control Panel applet, imdisk.exe and devio.exe. It is particularly useful to build for architectures not supported by the old WDK 7.1.0 environment, such as arm and arm64.

API

API functions are available for C/C++, COM and .NET clients. If you want to call functions for creating/removing/querying virtual disks from your own program you can #include the file inc\imdisk.h in your C/C++ source files and link the cpl\i386\imdisk.lib library. Read inc\imdisk.h in source archive for documentation about C/C++ usage. If you would like information about how to write compatible server-end software in C/C++ you can take a look at the I/O packet structures in inc\imdproxy.h.

A class library DLL for COM and .NET developers is available as a separate wrapper DLL. You can download that DLL here, it can be used with .NET Framework 2.0 or later. There is also a .NET application called DiscUtilsDevio that combines image file format support in DiscUtils libraries with ImDisk. It requires .NET Framework 4.0 or later. It is available here. Look here for on-line documentation about .NET API. There are also, as usual, xml files with method/parameter descriptions available to each assembly file.

License

I have received some e-mails with questions whether or not it is okay to include this driver in a commercial product. The answer is yes, just like all other tools I publish here. However, note that a few lines of code are under the GNU GPL license. More specifically, the driver code related to floppy emulation. Some of the driver code is also ported to Windows NT from the FreeBSD 'md' driver.

This means that if you modify the code and/or include it in and/or redistribute it along with your own product, all of the modified/integrated/redistributed product that you distribute needs to be redistributed under GPL, including source code. If you wish to avoid GPL requirements, such as the need to redistribute source code, you would therefore need to remove all floppy emulation related code from the driver. I will be happy to do such modifications for you to make the code comply with your license requirements. Just send me an e-mail!

Zero and Random device driver - updated 10 September 2021

The Zero and Random device driver creates two device objects, \Device\Zero and \Device\Random and a symbolic link to each of these under \DosDevices so that they are reachable from Win32 applications using the syntax \\.\zero and \\.\random. The devices work like /dev/zero and /dev/random in *nix like environments. Zero produces zero characters and Random produces random characters in the read buffers. When written to both of the device objects act like a Null device, that is just accepting and ignoring the data in the write buffer. The drivers can e.g. be used with the classic dd tool or with my rawcopy tool to fill files, devices etc with zero or random characters, e.g. to wipe out the contents of a hard drive.

Beginning with version 1.1.0.3 different versions are installed on different versions of Windows. On Vista and later, random numbers are generated by system cryptographic random number generator. On earlier versions random numbers are generated by RtlRandom or RtlRandomEx API functions with a time based seed.

The install package installs the driver and loads it into the kernel and setup for automatic load when Windows starts up. The driver can be uninstalled using Add/Remove programs applet in the Control Panel.

Download the install package - 172.9 KB. Works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. Security Notice: Always download setup packages to a new empty directory. To run a setup package from a directory with other unrelated files could be dangerous!