In the November 26, 1997 Be NewsLetter #101  Dmitriy Budko wrote an article called 'A Remembrance of Things Past: Writing Mass Storage Device Drivers'.

Here he updated some obsolete code for a ram drive to get it working with Beos 3.x(?).   Later a Mr. <petersens@jps.net> updated the code to work with Beos 4.0, this code however, did not work well in 4.5.  At this point I came along and reading the Be Book 5 and BeUnited's driver pages added a few more lines of code and lots of comments (remarks) to try make it compatible with Beos 5PE.  I sent a message to Mr. <petersens@jps.net> and he too had not gotten it to work with Beos 5 yet.  After trying for a two weeks of failure a Mr. Carlos Hasan on BeUnited reading my cry for help sent me a message saying he got it working.  I asked how and from his clues got the first two working versions.  He also told me where to store the compiled file. When I got my help from Carlos Hasan in http://www.beunited.org he said:

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Carlos Hasan (Chasan) on Tuesday, May 9, 2000 - 09:25 pm

 I looked at your code, and made some fixes until it worked here. First, you have to compile the code using the C compiler, not C++;. You'll have to fix the code to compile correctly in C. I also renamed the device from disk/virtual/ram_drive to disk/virtual/ramdrive. 

To test the driver, copy the binary to 
~/config/add-ons/kernel/drivers/bin/ramdrive, and make a link in 
~/config/add-ons/kernel/drivers/dev/disk/virtual/. 

Carlos 

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The best way to compile the code is just open a terminal to the directory where the code and the makefile is and type in 'make', the system takes it from there.  Then just place the compile object code as per Carlos' instructions.

Note: In an exchange of messages both Carlos and I have problems mounting the RAMDISK using the terminal.  We both ended up using DriveSetup in preferences to get it started.

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Another useful hint from Carlos

From: Carlos Hasan
Sent: Sunday, May 14, 2000 11:03 PM
To: earlcp@conpute.com
Subject: Re: ram drive

Btw, if you don't have another PC to debug the driver through the serial line and dprintf(), do the following:

- Press F1 when you boot BeOS, and enable the output console
- Open a Terminal window and type:

	tail -f /var/log/syslog

You will see the messages printed with dprintf() in your Terminal.

Carlos

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I would Like to Thank Carlos, Mr. <petersens@jps.net> and Larry Baydak for thier help in developing the Beos 5 code, and  Dmitriy Budko making me aware that such code existed.

                      Earl Colby Pottinger

