trying to extract files from this .exe

its the ATI catalyst .exe you download from ati. Now I know its easy to do a silent install once you've ran the program and it extracts the files, but I need to be able to disassemble the original .exe

How does one figure out what exactly can open up this exe and extract the files silently? There are no switches for it, but all it does is uncompress the files and run setup.exe for you.

Try WinRAR.

it was the first thing I tried.

is it a self-extracting zip? if so, i believe all the extracted files end up in a temp directory before the setup.exe is run. c:\temp maybe? should be on your drive somewhere obvious

Seems to be an nsis installer: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page

From the faq it takes a /S switch to silently extract the files if thats what you are trying to do, if not hopefully that link helps.

Lord of Shadows said:

Seems to be an nsis installer: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page

From the faq it takes a /S switch to silently extract the files if thats what you are trying to do, if not hopefully that link helps.

Click to expand...

thanks, you're right. how did you know it was an NSIS installer? I was trying to determine what kind it was for a while, but nothing in the file properties gave me any clues.

So the /S silently extracts the files, but it still calls setup.exe, and it pops up, I wonder if its possible to stop this behaviour too, or if its something thats hardcoded into their installer

Yeah, I recognized the llama, some open source software that I compile from source for windows uses it. Anyhow, the installer logic is a simple script, if some one really wanted to go through the trouble I'm sure one could remaster the installer some how. -- I'll look into it a little.

Edit: You may just be better off downloading nsis and remaking the installer the way you want it, I dont think it really does anything more than extract those files and start the installer, you should be able to grab an example, do a little editing and make the installer using makensis.exe <yourinstallerscript.nsi>

well see I can't do that because in order for my program to work, it needs to be able to download the file, silently decompress it, and then silently install it.

If I could just figure out what program could open this installer, and find a way to get the files manually, I could have my program do all the necessary actions to make it happen.

Supposedly 7zip will open it (not sure if that helps), nsis supports these compression methods: ZLib, BZip2, LZMA. They have a forum and some one just asked the question you want an answer to there. (how to stop that darn installer from automatically starting)

I'm tired, good luck. ;o)

thanks for your help, I think I'm getting close to the solution