Extract Files from Patches

Heath Stewart

From the mailbag, someone asked how to extract files from a patch. Now presumably one would want to extract the files as they apply to a product if the patch were installed but I will cover both ways because one can lead to the other. If you’re looking for the simplest and quickest way to extract files from a patch skip toward the end; otherwise, if you’re interested in the structure of a .msp file and how to extract all files regardless of a particular product the patch targets read on.

Recall from What’s in a Patch that a .msp file contains sub-storages for pairs of transforms that transform the patch target package to the patch upgrade package, and possibly one or more sub-streams for the cabinet files that contain the files to be patched. Because the internal structure of a .msp file uses OLE structured storage you can extract the transforms and cabinet files out; however, to allow for 72 characters instead of 36 characters as limited by OLE, Windows Installer compresses stream names except for the summary information stream, named 05SummaryInformation. You’ll also find more streams than perhaps expected for use by Windows Installer. That doesn’t prevent you from at least extracting the cabinet files from .msp files.

To enumerate and thereby extract all sub-storages and streams use the OLE structured storage APIs like the StgOpenStreamEx function to get a pointer to the IStorage interface. Call the IStorage::EnumElements function on the interface to get the IEnumSTATSTG interface pointer. As typical with IEnumXXXX interface implementations, call the Next function. In this case you get an STATSTG structure. If the STATSTG.type field is STGTY_STORAGE (1) you’ve found a transform and the STATSTG.pwszName is the name of the transform. If the STATSTG.type field is STGTY_STREAM (2) you’ve found a stream. To determine if the stream is a cabinet you can check the first 4 bytes of the stream for “MSCF”.

Patches produced with PatchWiz.dll from the Windows Installer SDK will contain one cabinet with all files for all transforms in the patch. The files in the cabinet all use the value of the File column of the File table so with a quick lookup you can get whatever files you want. This allows you get all of the files for a patch regardless of what product .msi packages the patch targets. Obviously there’s quite a bit of work here.

A similar approach is to open the .msp file using the MsiOpenDatabase function, passing MSIDBOPEN_PATCHFILE for the second parameter. Note that this cannot be done in a custom action because the second parameter will marshal as a string so any value besides MSIDBOPEN_READONLY (0) won’t marshal correctly.

You can then use the view APIs like the MsiDatabaseOpenView, MsiViewExecute, and MsiViewFetch functions to query the _Storages table to get the transforms and the _Streams table to get the cabinet file in a patch. Querying the _Streams table in a .msi file or a .msm file may also return other streams like binaries in the Binary table or icons in the Icon table. While you can read data directly from the Data column of the _Streams table using the MsiRecordReadStream function you cannot read from the Data column of the _Storages table. You can use the names and the OLE structured storage APIs as described above to get the exact name of the sub-storage to extract using the IStorage::OpenStorage function.

There is a much simpler way to accomplish all of this but you’ll only extract files from a patch that apply to a specific product since the first pair of transforms to apply to a product from a patch are used. If your patch only targets a single product then you have no worries. You first perform an administrative installation of the target product .msi package, which runs only basic actions like InstallFiles in the AdminExecuteSequence table. Passing the command to start /wait will block until msiexec.exe completes and returns.

start /wait msiexec /a product.msi TARGETDIR=”%TMP%Product” /qn

Next you apply the patch that contains the files you want to extract. This is the same method you would use to apply any minor upgrades that a patch might target. Patches will typically transform the AdminExecuteSequence table to add the PatchFiles action.

start /wait msiexec /p patch.msp /a “%TMP%Productproduct.msi” /qn

Now the files that were patched in the product will exist in the directory structure and you can fish them out as necessary. If your patch targets multiple products you’ll need to repeat this for each product, which is why in such cases the more complicated method of file extraction described above is beneficial. Note also that any directories that depend upon 64-bit redirection but whose source directories structures are the same will overwrite files because such redirection is not performed for administrative installations. This happened with an early pre-release of the .NET Framework 2.0.

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