Windows 7 - What are the .man files on Win 7 DVD

When I look at my Windows 7 Pro X64 DVD, I see a lot of files with a .MAN extension.

I'm guessing they are some kind of compressed set of files like .CAB or .ZIP. If so, what do I need to look at them? With a cab file, I could use cabarc.

What I'm doing is creating a list of every file contained in the Win 7 DVD as I did for XP so I can easily find out if a file I need is somewhere on the CD/DVD or not.

I have a program that does this for XP and want to modify it as needed for Windows 7.

Here's what I found.

This will not work for Windows Vista or 7. Unlike Windows XP where the OS files were in the i386 folder, this is no longer the case. Nothing on the DVD goes onto the computer but an image from install.wim. Even so you cannot just drag files from there to your live OS.

Is there somewhere I can read about this? I see this:

7/14/09 4:29a 2860840523 ---R- h:\sources\install.wim

That's a 2.8GB file. Is there no way to index it or see what it contains? How does the installer access it to extract the files. I find this very interesting and would like to learn more about it.

Edit: I found the info I needed: Windows AIK for Windows 7

install.wim contains multiple images, similar to Norton Ghost. To access the files from within you mount it using Windows Automated Installation Kit which comes with imagex.exe. However, there is zero need to do that. Everything required to run Windows is already on the computer, akin to copying the i386 folder to the HDD.

C:\Windows\winsxs, contains hardlinks to ever system file. A simple repair (from the running system) can easily fix most common problems of missing files. SFC /SCANNOW Command - System File Checker

I see 10,084 links in C:\Windows\winsxs, Now, to see how I convert them into actual file locations. Time to do some reading.

Thank you for the information.

I just found GimageEX which is a GUI front end to ImageEX so I'm playing with that at the moment.

Lots of fun!