How can I develop a virtual drive.

Question

Hi,

I would like to create a virtual drive for windows. I'm not looking to map a drive or something like that, I'm looking to map it to my dll functions or something of that sort.

How can I get this accomplished?

I read that I would have to develop a device driver, or a shell extension? I have a lot of experience with C++ and C#. Where do I get started?

I want to make it as simple as possible at first, how much time do I think it would take me? And whats the simplest way to do it, so that I could build my prototype.

My motivation is to pipe a file into an application, that currently only reads files from the file system. I'm only interested in pumping 1 file, so I think that a whole virtual drive would be an overkill, as well as writing kernel mode code.

Thanks guys.

Answer 1

If you want to build it from scratch then yes, you have to build a driver. However, it would be much easier for you to use a proxy driver like Dokan, and create the file system in user mode.

Take a look at the Wikipedia article on IFS, there are links to other useful tools at the bottom of the page.

Answer 2

I don't know what it worth, and it's not open source, but I've found this. It's a "fuse" like for windows