Is it possible to perform Windows boot-time actions before paging is enabled?

Question

I would like to perform some actions at Windows boot time before paging is enabled. I know I can run startup scripts with Task Scheduler or with group policy startup scripts.

My question is whether it's possible to guarantee that my script runs before paging is enabled. I want the script to decide whether to use encrypted paging or not at boot time. So my script would decide whether to do this: fsutil behavior set encryptpagingfile 1 or this: fsutil behavior set encryptpagingfile 0

so that when paging is enabled (after this script), it would be encrypted or not depending on whether the script turns it on or off.

Thanks.

Scott

Answer 1

It's possible, but you must write your program to directly use the Native API instead of Win32, similar to the way PageDefrag and the built-in filesystem checker (AutoChk) were written. (Yes, this implies writing it in C rather than batch scripts.)

...And, of course, "before paging is enabled" is way before Windows even touches the network, so the latest group policies won't have been fetched yet.