simhaonline / winmd

WinMD

WinMD v0.1

WinMD is a driver allowing Windows to access MD RAID devices - software RAID volumes created by mdadm on Linux. Bear in mind that you will still need a filesystem driver: see, for instance, WinBtrfs and Ext2fsd.

Everything here is released under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL); see the file LICENCE for more info. You are encouraged to play about with the source code as you will, and I'd appreciate a note ([email protected]) if you come up with anything nifty.

Donations

I've been developing this driver for fun, and in the hopes that someone out there will find it useful. But if you want to provide some pecuniary encouragement, it'd be very much appreciated:

• Paypal

Features

• RAID 0
• RAID 1
• RAID 4
• RAID 5
• RAID 6
• RAID 10 (near, far, offset)
• Linear
• Recognizes version 1 superblocks (1.0, 1.1, 1.2)
• Nested sets

Todo

• whole-disk RAID (i.e. recognizing partitions on MD device)
• reshaping
• rebuilding
• checking
• degraded mounts
• adding and removing devices
• creating new sets from Windows
• RAID4/5/6 journal
• write-intent bitmaps
• version 0.9 superblocks

Installation

To install the driver, download and extract the latest release, right-click winmd.inf, and choose Install. The driver is signed, so should work out of the box on modern versions of Windows.

For the very latest versions of Windows 10, Microsoft introduced more onerous requirements for signing, which are only available to corporations and not individuals. If this affects you (i.e. you get a signing error when trying to install the driver), try disabling Secure Boot in your BIOS settings.

There's also a Chocolatey package available - if you have Chocolatey installed, try running choco install winmd.

Uninstalling

From an elevated command prompt, run:

RUNDLL32.EXE SETUPAPI.DLL,InstallHinfSection DefaultUninstall 132 winmd.inf

You will probably need to give the full path to winmd.inf. Next time you reboot, Windows will remove the driver from your system.

You can also disable it by opening regedit and setting the value of HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\winmd\Start to 4.

Changelog

v0.1 (2019-07-31):

• Initial release