Finding Files On The Win 95 Installation CD

Have you ever discovered that a Win 95 system file is missing from your hard disk, or have you ever wanted to search the Installation CD for particular file names?

Most Windows 95 installation and system files are stored in a set of compressed Cabinets (CAB files), like Zip files, on the Windows 95 CD.

If you haven't installed Windows 95 yet, you can run Extract from the root directory of the CD. If you have installed Windows 95, You'll find EXTRACT.EXE in the \WINDOWS\COMMAND directory.

Here are some examples of how to use EXTRACT:

1. Before installing Windows 95, you might want to retrieve a series of text README files that contain notes on setup and compatibility issues. Microsoft does not place these files on the CD in uncompressed format, but it's easy to find and extract them:

   EXTRACT /A D:\WIN95\WIN95_02.CAB *.TXT

   This command will extract all TXT files from the CAB to the current directory. Because we added the /A switch, EXTRACT will search through all files in the specified directory (D:\WIN95\) that have file names in sequence (Win95_03, Win95_04, etc.), starting with the CAB file we specified (WIN95_02.CAB).

2. If you simply want to produce a list of the files without extracting them to disk, modify the command as follows:

   EXTRACT /A /D D:\WIN95\WIN95_02.CAB *.TXT >TEXTLIST.TXT

   This will write a CAB-by-CAB listing of all files. By adding the /D switch, we've indicated that we just want to list rather than actually extract the files. The >TEXTLIST.TST command redirects this listing from the screen (where it appears by default) to a text file called TEXTLIST.TXT).

3. Instead of limiting the search to .TXT files, you can generate a complete list of every file contained on the Windows 95 CD with:

   EXTRACT /A /D D:\WIN95\WIN95_02.CAB *.* >FILELIST.TXT

4. There are a couple of CAB files on your CD that don't use the WIN95_xx.CAB scheme. You can add a list of the files in these extra CABs to the FILELIST.TST listing we created in the previous step by executing these two commands:

   EXTRACT /A /D D:\WIN95\PRECOPY1.CAB *.* >>FILELIST.TXT
   EXTRACT /A /D D:\WIN95\MINI.CAB *.* >>FILELIST.TXT

   Changing the >FILELIST.TXT to >>FILELIST.TXT causes the listing to append to the end of the FILELIST.TXT. If we didn't use the ">>", DOS would overwrite the FILELIST.TXT each time we redirected the EXTRACT command.

5. Or do the next best thing and get this batch file for easy extracting.
   
6. Now there is and easier way to extract the file use Winzip version 7.0