deadbug

Attached is a working .ibb file. It does not seem to be possible to control optimisation via the IBB file; I'm looking into that now. aio-dvd.7z

(Wow - the formatting really worked well at the end there ... I did put in a closing-code, honest )

I'll attach a full working IBB when I test a new one tomorrow. Here's a header that worked for me: IBB [START_BACKUP_OPTIONS] BuildInputMode=2 BuildOutputMode=2 Destination=D:\AIO\aio-dvd.iso DataType=0 Verify=1 FileSystem=3 UDFRevision=0 PreserveFullPathnames=0 RecurseSubdirectories=1 IncludeHiddenFiles=1 IncludeSystemFiles=1 IncludeArchiveFilesOnly=0 AddToWriteQueueWhenDone=0 ClearArchiveAttribute=0 VolumeLabel_ISO9660=AIO-TEST VolumeLabel_Joliet=AIO-TEST VolumeLabel_UDF=AIO-TEST Identifier_System= Identifier_VolumeSet= Identifier_Publisher=deadbug Identifier_Preparer= Identifier_Application=deadbugs script Dates_FolderFileType=0 Restrictions_ISO9660_InterchangeLevel=2 Restrictions_ISO9660_CharacterSet=1 Restrictions_ISO9660_AllowMoreThan8DirectoryLevels=1 Restrictions_ISO9660_AllowMoreThan255CharactersInPath=1 Restrictions_ISO9660_AllowFilesWithoutExtensions=1 Restrictions_ISO9660_AllowFilesExceedingSizeLimit=1 Restrictions_ISO9660_DontAddVersionNumberToFiles=1 Restrictions_Joliet_InterchangeLevel=1 Restrictions_Joliet_AllowFilesWithoutExtensions=1 Restrictions_Joliet_AddVersionNumberToFiles=1 Restrictions_UDF_DisableUnicodeSupport=0 Restrictions_UDF_DVDVideoDontDisableUnicodeSupport=0 Restrictions_UDF_DVDVideoDontDisableUnicodeSupport_SF=0 Restrictions_UDF_HDDVDVideoDontDisableUnicodeSupport=0 Restrictions_UDF_HDDVDVideoDontDisableUnicodeSupport_SF=0 Restrictions_UDF_BDVideoDontDisableUnicodeSupport=0 Restrictions_UDF_BDVideoDontDisableUnicodeSupport_SF=0 Restrictions_UDF_DVDVideoAllowUnicodeVolumeLabel=0 Restrictions_UDF_HDDVDVideoAllowUnicodeVolumeLabel=0 Restrictions_UDF_BDVideoAllowUnicodeVolumeLabel=0 Restrictions_UDF_AllowNonCompliantFileCreationDates=0 BootableDisc_MakeImageBootable=1 BootableDisc_MediaEmulationType=0 BootableDisc_BootImageFile=D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\boot\isolinux\isolinux.bin BootableDisc_DeveloperIdentifier=isolinux BootableDisc_LoadSegment=07C0 BootableDisc_LoadSectorCount=4 [END_BACKUP_OPTIONS] Obviously you get to pick your own destination and bootfile (my AIO-DVD is obviously based on ISOLINUX). Then there are lots of lines like this: [START_BACKUP_LIST] F|README.DOC|\|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\README.DOC F|README.HTM|\|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\README.HTM F|spnotes.htm|\|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\spnotes.htm F|vmlinuz|\|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\vmlinuz F|WIN51|\|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\WIN51 F|WIN51IC|\|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\WIN51IC ... F|ptreplicator-setup.exe|\DVD-Apps|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\DVD-Apps\ptreplicator-setup.exe F|IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU.exe|\DVD-Apps|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\DVD-Apps\IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU.exe F|RegExplorerListView.reg|\DVD-Apps|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\DVD-Apps\RegExplorerListView.reg F|avg_free_stf_en_85_409a1634.exe|\DVD-Apps|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\DVD-Apps\avg_free_stf_en_85_409a1634.exe F|ashampoo_firewall_sm.exe|\DVD-Apps|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\DVD-Apps\ashampoo_firewall_sm.exe F|PostInstallRegistryUpdate.reg|\DVD-Apps|D:\AIO\AIO-DVD\DVD-Apps\PostInstallRegistryUpdate.reg [END_BACKUP_LIST] At the moment I'm working on generating the IBB so I've not fiddled with handling ImgBurn itself automatically. Once I've built the IBB I fire up ImgBurn, click the icon to create from files/folders, load the project (IBB) and burn. The only way I've found to affect optimisation is to click the option, but I expect that I can drive it from a .INI file. So once I've got the IBB generation striaghtened out I'll move on to automating the burning. Right now, having verified that optimisation works, I've turned it off: it takes too long for generating a test ISO and it's of no help in that case (I'm burning one XP variant plus some apps plus WPI). Once I've got everything else straight I can worry about the one-plus tweaks Not sure what you mean here. I can certainly ask for C:\A\B\C\x.txt on my hard drive to appear at \ALPHA\BETA\gamma.txt on my DVD, I can even have it also appear at \DELTA\theta.txt just by writing two "F" lines like so: F|gamma.txt|\A\B\C|C:\A\B\C\x.txt F|theta.txt|\ALPHA\BETA\|C:\A\B\C\x.txt although I don't actually do that (yet). Whether that takes one or two lots of space on the actual DVD presumably depends on whether optimisation is on or off. Interestingly I don't seem to need to track directories and write "D" lines for each of them. (I say "seem" because I've managed to write a DVD that installs WXP so I guess I really mean that I've not yet found a problem ...)

A little bit of scribbling later and it seems I can write an IBB file that constructs an AIO-DVD that can boot and install WXP SP3. A fruitful Sunday evening I think. Thanks for the pointers - that sped things up quite a bit. I still have a fair bit of reorganising to go but the proof-of-concept seems to have worked.

4,304,9943,104 bytes right now, so close to the real 4GiB limit. But to get it down that far I've trimmed it by removing older service packs (WXP Pro SP1 etc). Thanks - that looks good. It's certainly scriptable and it does have an option buried in there to optimise away duplicates. The .IBB format seems simple enough if undocumented. I guess I can feed it an existing DVD to analyse and let it generate a template IBB from that. I'll do some testing. Thanks for those too. I'll look at them if ImgBurn doesn't work out.

I've been building an AIO DVD for some time now and the ISO has slowly grown to 4GiB. I've also been looking for ways to update it with less effort. I've decided that with a little scripting I can probably make it much more customisable (e.g. pick and choose which OS variants I want today, which apps or app groups I want today etc.). I can do all of that if I'm prepared to copy around OS trees (Windows XP Pro SP3, Windows XP Pro SP3, Windows XP SP3+latest updates etc. etc.) and build a tree with the required customisations each time. But that's expensive on disk space and will take a lot of time. So I've looked around for a program that will create an ISO using a text file to tell it where to find each source file and where to place it in the DVD tree. CDBurnerXP *almost* fits the bill. It looks like its DXP "compilation format" will do exactly what I want. So my script can build a list of files for the DVD I want to build today and CDBurnerXP will create a customised ISO. Unfortunately it doesn't optimise identical files. (This means that for such files the data is written once and all the relevant TOC entries point to that same data). For that I still need CDIMAGEGUI. Now I could let CDBurnerXP run, have it build a 12GiB ISO, mount that with Daemon Tools and then have CDIMAGEGUI use that as a source and build the real ISO. That seems incredibly wasteful. So are there any scriptable optimising ISO creators out there? I've just asked in the CDBurnerXP forum if the optimising feature already exists or if it might be considered for the future. Looking at other questions in there, it seems fairly hit and miss whether I'll get an answer. UltraISO has the optimisation feature, but doesn't seem to be scriptable. Nero seems to have neither feature. CDIMAGE does the optimisation but burns a directory tree as-is. mkfsiso looks like it might be able to do some of this (along with duplicate file linker) but it achieves this by fiddling with the source tree. So is there anything out there which can do this?