On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Mike Hicks wrote:

> On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 13:45, Munir Nassar wrote:
> > Is anyone here familiar with unpacking windows InstallShield files under 
> > linux/windows?
> > 
> > I want/need to update the BIOS on my laptop to fix some ACPI issues but 
> > the bios firmware only comes in an installshield .exe file. I tried 
> > installing this on $windowsbox and it did not work as it actually does 
> > some hardware checks to make sure it is being installed on said laptop.
> 
> I know I've been able to get stuff out of .exe files with 'unzip' on
> occasion, but I can't be sure if they were InstallShield files or not. 
> I think InstallShield might have used zip file formats in the past, but
> they seem to have moved on in past years (possibly to RAR as Andrei's
> post suggests).  There are some RAR tools on Linux, so it might be worth
> giving them a try.

tried that already, cabextract was able to extract the wrapper .exe:
$ cabextract pha6k14nll.exe 
Extracting cabinet: pha6k14nll.exe
  extracting: \Setup.exe
  extracting: \ikernel.ex_
  extracting: \setup.inx
  extracting: \data2.cab
  extracting: \layout.bin
  extracting: \data1.hdr
  extracting: \data1.cab
  extracting: \Setup.ini
Finished processing cabinet.

but the cab files do not seem to be regular cab files:
$ cabextract data1.cab 
Extracting cabinet: data1.cab
data1.cab: not a Microsoft cabinet file.
$ cabextract data2.cab 
Extracting cabinet: data2.cab
data2.cab: not a Microsoft cabinet file.

opening these files in WindowsExplorer simply gives me an empty archive, 
(yes i have hidden files unhidden, same for system yada yada yada)

I also tried installing this using a BartsPE bootable CD, but that did not 
work because it could not install onto the CD, windows cannot access the 
ext3 filesystem on the HDD.

So, short of installing winders on a spare drive, can anyone think of a 
way to flash the BIOS on this system?

> By the way, what is the advantage of RAR?  It seems to be a program that
> makes things more complicated rather than less (though I suppose it gets
> somewhat better compression in some cases -- never seemed to be as good
> as gzip or bzip2 to me).

because the commandline windows/dos versions of bzip2 suck.

-- 
Munir Nassar
RedConcepts.NET
http://redconcepts.net/

_______________________________________________
TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list