Self Extracting "Blocked" zip files

[Dennis Passmore]

Hi Kevin,

Here is a new project for you. I have some large VmWare machines setup in which I need to zip then up and then burn them to DVD for later extraction and loading on to other PC's.

The problem is that the "sfx32pro.bin" loader only works with single "exe" type archives. Since the archives I am creating are larger than 2gig the *.exe it creates is too large for the OS to execute.

I can quite easily create "blocked" archives using VclZipPro but I can not have "Blocked - Self extracting" archives.

Example: A typical (7.7gb) VmWare system zips down to a "blocked" archive of 6 - 660mb zip files which can be burnt to 6-CDs or 1-DVD depending on the end user requirements.

Any ideas?

[Kevin]

Modifying the sfx stub to work with spanned zip files is something I'd like to do, but finding the time is another thing. It's on my list.

You could, however, build your own exe, using VCLZip and just be sure you put it on the first and/or last disk. I would think that since you are working with such a large amount of data anyways, a few hundred extra kb in size would not matter (over the size of the smaller sfx32pro.bin).

BTW, the sfx32pro.bin does work with files as large as 4 gig instead of 2 gig however.

Kevin