Run Firefox in RAM partition (tutorial)

Patik · Post by **Patik** » February 19th, 2004, 11:48 pm

Just wrote this up this evening. It's sort of a combination of tips, but I hoped to present it in an easy-to-follow way. I'm looking for feedback on its usefulness, readability, and ease of understanding.

http://www.patik.com/guides/mozilla/ffram

rfrangioni77 · Post by **rfrangioni77** » February 20th, 2004, 12:16 am

Excellent writeup, Patik, thanks!

Quick question, though...if I want to put Firefox on a Memory Stick (which is my next little project), I can stop before the "Now download and install RAMDisk...." paragraph, right? Is everything above that paragraph all that is needed to run Fx from a MemStick or USB drive?

TIA for the assistance.

Patik · Post by **Patik** » February 20th, 2004, 8:14 am

rfrangioni77 wrote:Quick question, though...if I want to put Firefox on a Memory Stick (which is my next little project), I can stop before the "Now download and install RAMDisk...." paragraph, right?

Yep. Just be sure that you change B:\ to the drive letter of the stick. I haven't yet figured out how to make it automatically detect that letter (since it depends on what computer it's plugged into).

Patik · Post by **Patik** » February 22nd, 2004, 6:06 pm

Originally it wasn't totally working, so I updated the page. If you've already tried it, the change I made was in the start_firefox.bat file.

steeef · Post by **steeef** » February 23rd, 2004, 6:37 pm

I'm a little wary of changing environment variables to trick Firefox into putting your profile somewhere else. Don't know if you noticed, but doing this makes Firefox think that "B:\ff_folder\" is equivalent to "c:\documents and settings\<current user>". Trying to save a file to the desktop while running Firefox with these environment variables set gave me an error message about not being able to find "B:\ff_folder\desktop". Plus, it's annoying to find that Windows creates Favorites and Recent Documents in this folder as well.

It might be safer to load Firefox with the Profile Manager to create a new profile whose location is at "B:\ff_folder\somefolder".

sleddog · Post by **sleddog** » February 23rd, 2004, 7:29 pm

You might look at a different RAM disk product: AR RAM Disk, http://www.arsoft-online.de/products/product.php?id=1

It lets you set your RAM disk in 1 mb increments. Much more flexible as you can devote only what you actually need to the RAM disk, and not tie up RAM unnecessarily.

gutzalpus · Post by **gutzalpus** » February 24th, 2004, 5:41 am

<i>Trying to save a file to the desktop while running Firefox with these environment variables set gave me an error message about not being able to find "B:\ff_folder\desktop".</i>
<br><br>
When I run firefox with those environment variables I can't even get the 'save link target as' or 'save page as' dialog boxes to come up at all. I tried creating the \ff_folder\desktop folder and it still won't seem to work. I tried this on about 3 different machines so perhaps I am missing something obvious here?

mmoy · Post by **mmoy** » February 24th, 2004, 2:00 pm

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze6w3dz/RamDisk.html

Patik · Post by **Patik** » February 25th, 2004, 9:23 am

Alright, I updated the page to use AR RAMDisk instead (thanks sleddog!) and to use the Profile Manager method so it doesn't screw with environment variables. I still need to test it out and possibly get it to work such that you dont have to go through the Profile Manager everytime you run it, but I figured it'd be best to make these changes ASAP since this thread has become a sticky.

http://www.patik.com/guides/mozilla/ffram

mmoy · Post by **mmoy** » February 25th, 2004, 9:39 am

I spent about three hours trying to get the AR Ramdisk product to work and was unsuccessful so I want back to the old one. Just a caution on that particular product.

laszlo · Post by **laszlo** » February 25th, 2004, 9:41 am

What was the particular problem? It's running smoothly here since about half a year.

mikeymike · Post by **mikeymike** » February 25th, 2004, 9:41 am

I couldn't get AR Ramdisk to work with ramdisk partitions over 64MB. I use Cenatek's (paid for) ramdisk: http://www.cenatek.com/product_ramdisk.cfm

Patik · Post by **Patik** » February 25th, 2004, 9:51 am

AR worked fine for me using the default options in Windows XP. Any other stories?

mikeymike, I'd like to stick with free options, but perhaps I can add a link to Cenatek and others for people who want to pursue it further, since 64MB is plenty for running Firefox.

mmoy · Post by **mmoy** » February 25th, 2004, 10:14 am

If you're running FireFox and Thunderbird on 64 MB, there isn't much space left. I'd like to add Composer++ at some point so that may push it over the edge for 64 MB. I'd certainly like more but don't really need it for now.

I was unable to get the AR RamDisk to install and configure so that it would be used. Unfortunately, it uses the same driver name as the other RamDisk too so this might have been a problem. It would be nice if you could create more than one device with that particular driver as having two of them would work well for what I want it for.

mikeymike · Post by **mikeymike** » February 25th, 2004, 10:21 am

I run OpenOffice off ramdisk as well.