keep pe files compresses

[voltaic]

is it possible to boot windows pe with all of the files that come compressed on a regular winxp cd compressed on the pe cd. i notice that you can boot into text mode setup from a pe cd under certain circumstances by not specifying the /minint switch in the txtsetup.sif file, which is essentially the same thing as just booting the regular winxp cd (right?)

anyway, there's my fragmented thoughts behind asking this question.

anyone else actually know about this?

-Sam

[likuidkewl]

yes you can, there are a few ways. Which ones are you looking to accomplish?

[voltaic]

well, windows pe is big, especially if you need more than just bare minimum functionality that you get after removing the "safe to remove" files list as provided by MS.

i'd like to have cdimage only encode theose files once when i use the -o switch.

also, does this make the boot time of pe dramatically slower? i know it will a little, but is it a lot?

anyway, thanks.

-sam

[likuidkewl]

well, windows pe is big, especially if you need more than just bare minimum functionality that you get after removing the "safe to remove" files list as provided by MS.

i'd like to have cdimage only encode theose files once when i use the -o switch.

also, does this make the boot time of pe dramatically slower?  i know it will a little, but is it a lot?

anyway, thanks.

-sam

You can get Pe down to about 86mb, I use Cdimage for all of my builds no problems. As for the boot lag, change the setupreg.hiv in PE1.2, or use a winpeshl.ini in 1.5 to utilize different programs, instead of the comman line.

[voltaic]

i think you misunderstood the question.

i want to have the files in the i386 directory of winpe be the same as those in the i386 directory of a regular windows cd. ie, i want the ones that CAN to remain cab compressed as in somefile.dl_ instead of a larger somefile.dll

this accomplishes 2 things: first of all, winpe is just smaller in terms of raw numbers. additionally, since there are 2 copies of somefile.dl_ instead of 2 files which are dissimilar (somefile.dll and somefile.dl_) you get to only encode the somefile.dl_ file once thanks to cdimage's -o command line option

so my question is/are:

1. is it possible for windows pe to boot from the compressed files, or is there a subset o the files used by windows pe that can remain compressed

2. if so, is there an easy way to do it?

[likuidkewl]

1. If you could keep them compressed, this would be useless due to the amount of time it would take to setup the environment.

2. No

[voltaic]

well ****!

not the answer i wanted, but thanks!

-Sam

[evilvoice]

actually, you could, but youd have to install on a hard drive...and itd prolly be a lot more complex...youd just set up a script to install to hard drive using the expand command (or what ever you use to zip the files up) change some things to make the hd bootable and it should work, but for booting on cd, no...this is because windows needs to be able to access the files uncompressed...if you had enough ram, you could even uncompress to memory, which would give the appearance of booting from cd (since nothing is saved on cd nor ram), but youd need a lot of ram...then you could uncompress the files there too...it can be done, just not the way I think youre talking about.

[bilemke]

Here is a bit of an alternative idea... XP setup can access most, if not all, compressed files (in file names xxxxx.xx_) if they are or are not compressed.

It would be a lot of work. But you could uncompress the files in xp setup's i386 folder that match the files PE uses. Then use cd image as usuall.

This will only be of so much value. You may have to compare the space lost to the new files that are not compressed but saved space gained by cdimage doing its magic. This might save some space compared to having the compressed file for xp setup and the uncompressed file for PE on the same disk.

[voltaic]

ok, well, if i can't run pe with the files compressed, i will uncompress the files that pe uses in the rest of my windows i386 type directories.

here is a batch that you can use to do this yourself. just run it from the directory containing the i386 dir from windows pe (it must bear that name) and the rest of your windows xp ditro folders such as "xppro" "xphome" etc. it will prompt you to enter the name of the directory to expand files in; just enter it in relative path format.

the code is easy enough to understand, but post if my explanation is poor.

[edit]

yay! i have a little star on my name now. how do you get those anyway?

anyway, i did this and noticed savings of ~50-75mb. i didn't pay too much attention to what it was before.

after actually paying attention to it, it saved 113MB.

I guess that it is also worth noting that the pe files have to be the same versions as the xp files when using this batch file.

expand_and_delete_duplicated_winpe_files.cmd

[bilemke]

@voltaic

Sweet.. I was hoping to try what you did some day. Had the idea of doing it as I wanted to fit PE and XP Setup on a single cd along with some added extra to PE.

Oh yeah.. just realised I got a gold star too!