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CAB corruption issues & how i solved them...


Sleepy P

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i been developing my "Sooper Edition" XP unattended disc for a good 2 weeks now.

one issue that crept into my disc early on was kinda strange.

one of my installed apps is PartitionMagic 8. the installation package was originally the stuff from the Pmagic CD all put into a sub-directory in my OEM share. this method worked fine...for a while.

i think about the time my disc got larger than 640 MB (approximately), PartitionMagic no longer would install. once i alllowed my disc to finish installing, i went into my OEM share on the test system and tried installing PartitionMagic using the standard installer with GUI, like a normal Joe. it worked until about halfway into the install, at which point the installer complained about files missing in one of the .cab files Pmagic uses to install itself. a check of the properties revealed something weird: about half the cab files inside the PartitionMagic installer directory were a lot larger than they should have been, which makes me think they were corrupted files.

a llittle more goofing around led me to conclude that my ISO image maker, MSFN.org's CDIMAGE.exe was the source of the problems. the source files on disk are fine. once the ISO is made, the files are corrupt.

to solve this issue, i simply compressed the PartitionMagic installer stuff into a self-extracting solid rar archive. this got around the corruption issue and cut the size of the installer a bit.

since then i began putting my OEM share stuff into one large self-extracting solid rar. i have found this has expanded my disc's contents considerably (not doing a DVD yet...).

to do this you'll need WinRar. i know you can do similair stuff with WinZip and other archiving utils, but i dunno the command line reference for them. in my installer package, the post-GUI mode stuff is handled by a bat file inside my OEM Install directory. this bat is left uncompressed, while everything else is put into the archive.

the first thing the batch does is uncompress the OEM share stuff as well as my drivers collection, which is done like this:

cd "%systemdrive%\Drivers"drivers.exe /silentdel drivers.exe /Q
cd "%systemdrive%\Install"install.exe /silentdel install.exe /Q

in this example, my OEM share install stuff is in an archive named install.exe, while the drivers are in one named driver.exe . so far this method works great. it will add to your overall installation time a bit, though. overall it kicks a**, i think

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i have found this has expanded my disc's contents considerably

Do you mean that your files got smaller after compression?

And, didn't the extraction process cause problems related to memory sufficiency?

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as i said above, i pack my files into self-extracting solid RAR archives. RAR compression is quite good. for instance, my drivers collection was about 92 MB uncompressed, and 45 MB compressed. i think i opened up a good 80 MB by using compression, which means 80 MB more stuff can be put on the CD.

i have no idea why you'd have issues with RAM, i never have, even testing on a Virtual PC with 64 MB of RAM....

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i think this has been mentioned before, not neccesarily about the corrupt CABs though. I"ve never seen that happen before, and I use CDImage. wierd.

however....

which means 80 MB more stuff can be put on the CD.

if your compression ratio remains constant, you'll get another 160 megs of stuff on your CD :)

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