Newby question on single .msi

[#1]

I am new to Admin Studio and I am hoping that someone more experienced can help me out. I apologize if this has been answered in an alternate thread, I searched and could not find a direct answer.

I am trying to determine if it is possible to take an existing .msi file and it's associated .cab file(s) and rebuild them into a single .msi file.

For example,if I wanted to rebuild Adobe Photoshop into a single .msi file. My first inclination would be do perform an administrative install of Adobe Photoshop to extract the embedded .msi file.

Once I have this, how can I take the extracted .msi file, and rebuild it into a single msi file with all of the associated files that were extracted during the administrative install?

Photoshop was used only as an example, this question applies to any application that has a .msi file embedded within it.

I would appreciate any feedback.

Thank You!!

[Cary_R]

Hi,

If you're going from an Admin image, this could be more difficult, since there's not a really clean way of getting the files back into a cab, adjusting file sequence numbers, then streaming the cab into the msi. If you already have *.cab's, though, you could use MsiDb.exe, I think, to stream it in, and then change the Media table to look internally for them:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370083.aspx

Failing all that, you can also open the *.msi in 'Wizard' mode (under the File -> Open dialog of Editor). This will actually create a project file out of the *.msi that you can rebuild. It's quite clever in that regard.

Let me know if you have questions on this.

--Cary

[#3]

Thanks Cary,

I will give these a try.