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CAB File Patches?

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Glenn9999

Programmer
Jun 19, 2004
2,312
US
Not having access to Windows 7, I really don't know a definite answer to this, so I'm asking here. Anyway, I look through the WSUS Scan file, and find that any of the patch URLs always reference CAB files. What is confusing me however is that I can go on the Microsoft Update Catalog site and I end up getting MSU files. Having pulled both links and opening up the MSU file I find the CAB file that is linked to in the WSUS Scan file.

Question: Can someone do something with the CAB file within Windows 7 to install it in an offline sense, or is the MSU required? If the MSU is required, how do you get around the fact that the WSUS Scan file only publishes CAB links? Thanks.

It is not possible for anyone to acknowledge truth when their salary depends on them not doing it.
 
Speaking of .cab files I found that a lot of Office updates when downloaded manually often come down as .cab files. I find that clicking on the .cab file opens it (usually in a Winzip window in my case) and clicking on the extracted file applies the patch without any problems.
 
Well, from what I could tell in reading about it, the MSU is applied by running WUSA.EXE against it. The MSU had some metadata files in it, along with another CAB file in it. I didn't know if those files were too important to the process or if you could run WUSA.EXE or something similar against the CAB file alone or not...opening the CAB file doesn't seem to reveal anything particularly user-executable.

Any thoughts?

It is not possible for anyone to acknowledge truth when their salary depends on them not doing it.
 
One way is to use DISM.EXE, which comes with Windows 7:


The article also describes how to use expand.exe to extract MSU file contents to a new folder.

Dism.exe works on both MSU and CAB files.

Some Microsoft Installer MSI EXE and DLLs also contain compressed archives.

The most universal 3rd party freeware unarchiver I use is 7-Zip, which will open nested archives in ISO WIM SWM RAR ZIP CAB EXE MSU MSI etc, and uses a simple drag and drop to extract.

It may be possible to install packages which are prohibited by the operating system compatibility settings or other blocks in this way. An example of this for Windows XP to enable LLTD for easier networking with Windows 7/Vista follows:

 
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