A long stretch: EWF during WinXP Pro setup

[Volatus]

Okay... now, bear with me, and break out your binoculars, I'm about to go miles over most people's heads. I just hope there is someone still out there that is flying as high as I am

Here's what I'm trying to do. Using the Shift+F10 "hack" I found (that opens the command prompt during Setup and allows you to, say, play Solitaire while you wait for Setup to finish), I want to be able to use EWF and have EWF (in RAM (REG) mode) store all writes that Windows Setup does to RAM instead of writing them to disk - in my case, Flash - then at the last moment as Windows Setup is "Removing any temporary files used", commit the changes to the drive and let Setup reboot.

It would all work fine. I got the driver to install and load during textmode setup (using txtsetup.sif and hivesys.inf tweaks after nLitening), but there's one problem. The "volume" class wasn't initialized in the registry during the GUI Setup phase. So the filesystem filter for Ewf is sitting on its lonesome on the class descriptor for the Volume class (in the registry), until Setup finally builds the Class structure.

Guh!

I tried letting Setup build those classes, then go into the recovery console and copy "SYSTEM" over "SYSTEM.SAV" (which Setup reloads when it "restarts setup" after rebooting - ugh!)... but I just got SLAPPED in the face by Microsoft with a "SYSTEM_LICENSE_VIOLATION" blue screen of death. Ouch.

Is it possible to get that filesystem driver (Ewf) to load on that volume after Windows is already started? Like antivirus software does it?

Why do I want to do this? Well... I'm installing Windows on an Asus Eee, which uses a 4gb Flash drive, not a hard drive. The more writes you make to that drive (i.e. installing/reinstalling Windows over and over), the more likely it is to go dead. It would also be nice to disable the page file during Setup, but... maybe later. It has 2gb RAM and that's more than enough to store the entire Windows installation as Setup builds it. I'm also installing Windows from USB (which is schweet - using the "install windows from USB" project here at MSFN). So I'd like to be able to use EWF to both speed up Setup, and help preserve this Flash.

Anyone?