OK, I tried searching for the answer, but IBB is pretty much useless in its search functionality. What are the settings used for makecab when recompressing driver.cab (after combining it with the other driver cabs) that allows for faster decompression? Is it just lowering CompressionMemory?

I pretty much used the default settings in powerarchiver when I recompressed driver.cab and sp2.cab

This is driving me nuts, because I think it was GreenMachine who posted on this before, but I can't find his post.

This is driving me nuts, because I think it was GreenMachine who posted on this before, but I can't find his post.

Why don't you take a look at Jdeboeck's batch files? They are able to remove drivers and other stuff and then recompress everything!

http://jdeboeck.msfnhosting.com

Here's the link to a specific thread about CABARC.EXE (CabARC) It's part of a discution on longhorn but it's the correct tool to use for making CAB's for XP install discs.

Here's the command line for it:

cabarc -r -p -m LZX:21 N mmssetup.cab *.*

I've used it several times when I was building both unattended XP install discs and testing MCE 2005. It's part of an offical Microsoft SDK that you can download free from their site (sorry cant remember where). It's offical name is "Cabinet Software Development Kit" the commands I've put in are very well documented but I've found I can shave a few meg off any standard MS cab by using this higher compression optimisation.

This is driving me nuts, because I think it was GreenMachine who posted on this before, but I can't find his post.

Why don't you take a look at Jdeboeck's batch files? They are able to remove drivers and other stuff and then recompress everything!

http://jdeboeck.msfnhosting.com

That's what I use . It suffers from the slow decompression time that I'm referring to. IIRC, you can adjust the settings so that the cab ends up at around 100MB (instead of ~80MB), but decompresses way faster. Heck, nLite even has the option to do the one or the other.

I think I'm gonna PM nuhi to get him in this thread

Here's the link to a specific thread about CABARC.EXE (CabARC) It's part of a discution on longhorn but it's the correct tool to use for making CAB's for XP install discs.

Here's the command line for it:

cabarc -r -p -m LZX:21 N mmssetup.cab *.*

I've used it several times when I was building both unattended XP install discs and testing MCE 2005. It's part of an offical Microsoft SDK that you can download free from their site (sorry cant remember where). It's offical name is "Cabinet Software Development Kit" the commands I've put in are very well documented but I've found I can shave a few meg off any standard MS cab by using this higher compression optimisation.

LZX:21 is what's giving you the higher compression. Those options are available with makecab as well, using the command switches /D CompressionType=LZX and /D CompressionMemory=21.

In your cab ddf file enter

.Set FolderSizeThreshold=5000000

or

.Set FolderSizeThreshold=2500000

Thx to mr. GreenMachine

THAT'S IT!!!

Thanks

(And I KNEW it was GreenMachine who posted it first )

either that, or you're looking for this:

makecab /D CompressionType=LZX /D CompressionMemory=21

This is for individual files, I suppose.

either that, or you're looking for this:

makecab /D CompressionType=LZX /D CompressionMemory=21

This is for individual files, I suppose.

And it's completely irrelevant. In fact, I already said those settings weren't what I needed.

LZX:21 is what's giving you the higher compression. Those options are available with makecab as well, using the command switches /D CompressionType=LZX and /D CompressionMemory=21.

nuhi gave me exactly what I was looking for.

OMG, that made a HUGE difference! And driver.cab was still only 78MB (no drivers removed).

Thanks a million! :thumbsup

OMG, that made a HUGE difference!  And driver.cab was still only 78MB (no drivers removed).

Thanks a million! :thumbsup

Could you maybe higher that value to get an even smaller driver.cab?

The point of that number isn't to increase compression, but to speedup decompression. Using the default value, it can take a long time to decompress files from there (setup will just "hang" from time to time).

FolderSizeThreshold=5000000 made a HUGE difference.

I just found this document :http://home.hiwaay.net/~pittman/archive/makecab.doc, which explains makecab/ddf files in detail.

This is what it says about FolderSizeThreshold:

Folders are compression/encryption boundaries.  The state of the compressor and cryptosystem are reset at folder boundaries.  To access a file in a folder, the folder must be decrypted and decompressed starting from the front of the folder and continuing through to the desired file.  Thus, smaller folder thresholds are appropriate for a layout where a small number of files needs to be randomly accessed quickly from a cabinet.  On the other hand, larger folder thresholds permit the compressor to examine more data, and so generally yield better compression results.  For a layout where the files will be accessed sequentially and most of the files will be accessed, a larger folder threshold is best.

--

Pyron