Portable programs are very usefull when booting from a WinPE and a Wimboot or a Compact install, when having them outside of our bootable WinPE/Wimboot/Compact (real or virtual) drive.
WinPEs: In this case it is even better if your Portables are compressed and self extractable (SFX) as long as they will be expanded usually to %Sytemdrive%\Temp or %Sytem%\Temp folder, in this case both located on X:, wich is the RAM drive where the boot.wim is loaded.
For additional info to create your own SFX programs see this topic on Post No. 5: http://reboot.pro/to...utable-from-pe/, the topic also includes links to download some SFX I have made.
On Wimboot or Compact install booting: The previous approach is not very useful as the SFX will extract to C:\Temp or C:\Windows\Temp folders depending the SFX creator. And this will affect adversily our limited espace available when filedisk booting or our available RAM when RAMbooting.
In this case is preferable keep the portables uncompressed ouside the Wimboot or Compact install drive, but in some cases this means a lot of space.
Creating a compressed folder (on Compact mode [file by file]) using Wof_compress:
Then to save space on NTFS drives we can compress our Portables folder using Wof_Compress by wimb to save space and latter defragment the drive where this folder is located with Deffragler or Winconting, but this may be a very long procedure if this drive is very big, also we need to remember if latter we want to copy the compressed folder Portables to another location, it will be copied but UNcompressed.
Creating a compressed folder (on Compact mode [file by file]) using wimlib:
But I remembered some time ago a not very well known/used option of wimlib-imagex, by Eric Biggers, also available on its unoficial GUI wimlib-clc, (by retokener), both let us make a WIM image (compressed or uncompressed) of the content of a folder too, and latter extract the info into the WIM file, to an existing target Folder. with our selected compression This way we can apply the content allready compressed to any NTFS drive. This also avoids the free space fragmentation on the drive. See attached picture.
NOTE: if the folder doesn't exist, we need to create the folder first.
It is necessary to remember any compressed info using Wof_Compress or wimlib-clc can not be read by 7, 8.0 and 8.1, unless the OS accesing the info has the wof.sys or wofadk.sys installed. Win 8.1 Update 1 already has the first version of wof.sys but it is not capable to read files compressed in Compact mode (that starded with 10), 10 already have newr versions of wof.sys integrated and capable to read files compressed in Compact mode.
To install wofadk.sys on 7, 8.0 and 8.1, just download and run WinNTSetup by JFX
Or from my old post: http://reboot.pro/to...10/#entry210893
If for some reason, we want to install the wofadk.sys driver without installing WinNTSetup, it can be downloaded with GetWaikTools from JFX and to install it, it is just put it into Windows\System32\drivers folder and run the attached reg file and reboot the OS.
alacran
Attached Files
- WofAdk.reg 1.72KB 7 downloads
Get WAIK Tools w/o downloading the huge ISO's by JFX
Script to include wofadk.sys on your ChrisPEs: http://reboot.pro/fi...-wofadk-script/
To add wofadk.sys to your old WinPEs see: http://reboot.pro/to...-sd-or-microsd/
NOTE: Win10XPE_x64 allready has wof.sys
Maybe latter I remember some other things I have tested and make new post on this topic.
EDIT: added a picture of my Aplications (Aplicaciones in Spanish) folder that is Compact LZX (applied using wimlib) located on my UEFI_MULTI (+Ventoy +agFM) by wimb, on a bootable MicroSD 32 GB.
alacran