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This question was inspired by Bob's comment to my answer here.

On boot, windows writes files to the hard drive (I imagine this to be the case, as it has a way of detecting if the boot was previously interrupted by a hard power-off, and I am sure many other things).

But assuming that there is a "smooth" boot, where there are no error, etc, and no logon scripts that run, and things like that, about how much (a few KB, a few MB, a few GB) data gets written to the drive?

For simplicity's sake, assume that:

  • hibernation is turned off
  • windows 7
  • pagefile is turned off (does this matter right at boot, or only later?)

How could one go about measuring this? Are there resources that have this information?

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    I don't have a exact number for a answer (and I don't know if it will be KB or GB) so I will leave this as a comment. You could create a VM with your parameters and track inside the host OS the total data written to the container that represents the hard drive in whatever VM software you are using.
    – Scott Chamberlain
    Commented Jun 17, 2012 at 7:07
  • Good idea, just lacking the windows VM part. Hopefully someone else will come along that can do that.
    – soandos
    Commented Jun 17, 2012 at 7:08
  • It's not necessarily the amount of new data written (i.e. overall size change) when in the context of deleted data recovery; any data that's overwritten (i.e. including deleted and then rewritten) has the potential to overwrite 'deleted' data.
    – Bob
    Commented Jun 17, 2012 at 7:10
  • right, but unless there is a way to know definitively where the written data will go, best to take a worst case scenario.
    – soandos
    Commented Jun 17, 2012 at 7:11

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Try WinBootInfo. According to them,

WinBootInfo is the advanced Windows Boot Analyzer that logs drivers and applications loaded during system boot, measures Windows boot times, records CPU and I/O activity during the boot, and much more!

Looking at a screenshot, there is a field called "Total I/O Data Write" (showing a few MBs in the screenshot)

Or try hIOmon. See Boot Logging Support.

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