"Approach is hard link friendly."

Thanks. Yes, this is all stemming from the topic over at MSFN.

@OverFlow:

"in most situations you can let your ISO creator do this for you"

True. I use CDIMAGE which does do this (which is just as well, otherwise it would be a 12GB DVD!).

But if I use hardlinks to avoid copies in some places it looks like it speeds things up.

My current workflow for XP Pro is something like:

1. Have a source SP3 directory available
2. Apply RyanVM to SP3 to produce SP3
3. Apply WMP11 (via boooggy) and IE7 (via nLite) to SPR
4. Apply DriverPacks to SPR to produce SPD.

Step (1) involves building SP3 in my DVD from a stable SP3 in a source tree and
using hardlinks shaves a few minutes off.

In step (2) I get RyanVM's integrator to do the heavy lifting from SP3 to SPR - but the slow
part here is the processing and compression etc. No hardlinks involved.

Step (3) only touches SPR (which is not hardlinked).

Step (4) needs an SPD to start with, and using hardlinks again shaves a few minutes
(and now appears to be safe to do).

I also need to build boot folders for SP3, SPR and SPD (I want all of them on the
DVD) and hardlinks should help here too.

So it looks like I'm good to go!

Many thanks both of you for your input.

-- deadbug

in most situations you can let your ISO creator do this for you... they can optimize multiple links to a singe file in the TOC and only burn the file once to the media (ISO) i cant remember teh name of this optomization technique off the top of my head sorry...

Base does rename txtsetup.sif to txtsetup.org. A new file txtsetup.sif file is created.
Base does rename a existing winnt.sif to winnt.org. A new file winnt.sif file is created.

Search for *.org. There are more files renamed.

Approach is hard link friendly.

I don't know about editing existing files.

It seems that one way of achieving this might be to use hardlinks. The idea would be to have a source (say \SRC\XP\SP3). Rather than copying that to \AIO\XP\SP3 and applying DriverPacks, I would create a bunch of hardlinks in \AIO\XP\SP3 back to \SRC\XP\SP3. This will obviously save space and should be quicker too since no data needs to be copied.

This scheme will fall apart if the tools that I then use to process \AIO\XP\SP3 patch or rewrite files in situ rather than removing them and replacing them, since the hardlinks would then mean that \SRC\XP\SP3 would be altered too.

I cannot see DriverPacks altering any files (except WINNT.SIF) but that might just be a lucky coincidence with my setup. Or I might simply have missed something.

So does DriverPacks currently rewrite any files?

Thanks

-- deadbug