Edit MSIs with Orca

September 12, 2007

I work for a software company that has an installer that keeps its files in a .cab archive with really odd names, (i.e. “_2269sadakdk39a4″) which it renames appropriately during install. That’s all fine and dandy… until I needed to pull a specific file out.

Enter Orca. With Orca, I was able to look at the msi file and determine which ridiculously named file was the correct one, extract it, and rename it appropriately. You can do other things such as changing the text in the installer and I’m sure lots of other fun things that I have not had time to discover.

Microsoft has an article that gives the lowdown on Orca here. That article contains a link to the Windows SDK that contains Orca.

If you’re like me and don’t want to waste time downloading/installing the entire SDK, the small Orca.msi file is available on here, from Technipages.com

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