High compression cabinet utility?

Status
Not open for further replies.

Spike

Posts: 2,122   +0
I have a fileset consisting of a number of small com, exe, and text based files (you get the idea) that I would like to fit on what space I have left on a floppy.

It's about 5.5 MB in total, which the makecab command can reduce to a 2.25 cab file.

Unfortunately, I need to compress it with a ratio of about 10:1. Does anybody know of such a utility?
 
No archiver can guarantee you ratio X. It all depends on the exact nature of your data.

Does it have to be cabinet format? Self-extracting RAR or sth similar is out of the question? You can use UPX to compress executable files and get totally transparent file reduction.
 
Yes, I understand that, but thought to give the ratio for a very rough idea of how compressed I need it.

To be honest I don't actually know if it has to be a cab. It's the EDB cab of a win98 bootdisk with a number of extras I've added in, and is intended to be placed back on it.

Just me tinkering around a little really, but if I can't do it this way, I'll have to find a way of loading it off two additional disks as part of the win98 boot disk startup, which would be a bit of a pain in the proverbial backside really.

If I thought it would work I'd use an sfx 7zip. - it must be 16 bit and extractable from the DOS command line.
 
OK. No matter. I just used a few extra IF EXIST and GOTO's in the autoexec to load a spanned file. Just split the CAB file with the cli version of Goetz's File Splitter and reconstructed it onto an enlarged ramdrive, then expanded it on there.

What I've learned is that not even format.com from an xp install will work in a true DOS environment.

Not a total loss though, because I did manage to load up NTFS support to the win98 boot floppy. If there's an NTFS read/writer for DOS other than the extortionally priced ntfsdos professional, preferabbly open source, I'll be able to build a utility for replacing files etc in winXP, while the added benefit(? lol) of a true dos environment. t'would be handy for the deleting of those seemingly undeleteable files, plus would have directories that the recovery console can't access to retrieve the files. Provided they aren't encrypted, for data retrieval and ownership removal.
 
AFAIK the only free NTFS solution is Captive-NTFS for Linux that uses Windows drivers to do its stuff.

An open-source NTFS read-write solution is still years away and I don't think any of the proprietary utilities are going to be proclaimed freeware anytime soon.
 
You know, KGB Archiver doesn't create cabinets.

It was actually recently posted in here, where everybody was highly suspicious.

However, having already suggested that I might try doing a little "independant testing" of it, I thought I'd try it out (before my previous post here.)

What I found is that it's complete and utter rubbish. Sorry - but it is.

My computer specs can be found in my profile - it was my primary machine that I used. Firstly, I didn't have enough memory apparently for anything above "very good" compression. This inspite of all my swap space. Hmm.

Anyway - Winrar AND makecab alike were able to compress my files in a matter of seconds to an archive of about 2313KB.

7zip, at the highest settings I could find, managed in seconds to create an archive of 2194KB.

KGB archiver however, set to "very good" compression, took a whole 30 minutes (!!!) to compress it to only 2190KB, and during that time, my computer was completely unusable because KGB had used pretty much all available resources. To be honest, the program completely sucks, and I never want to see or hear of it again. In fact, I am so unimpressed that I might just do a little indepentant testing on a proper scale, purely to laugh at its claims, and then forget that it exists.

Nothing against yourself personally here, It's just that that program did everything I expected of it, which really wasn't that impressive.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back