WinCE CabWiz error: “inf contains DirIDs, which are not supported”

Question

When building the windows mobile cab for our product, the windows CE CAB Wizard (CabWiz.exe) sometimes returns the error:

Error: File c:\docume~1\build\locals~1\temp\wiz3340.inf contains DirIDs, which are not supported

This error can occur when using more than 998 files, ~260 directories, or when a % sign is unescaped (with another %), but these don't apply in our case.

Has anyone run into this issue before? Thanks!

Answer 1

I ran into this issue today, and found a solution for me that worked here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100330064330/http://blogs.msdn.com/raffael/archive/2008/03/18/x-inf-contains-dirids-which-are-not-supported.aspx

So I thought: ok, he's hitting the known limit of 998 files that could be packaged in a CAB... Wrong: the problem happened also when using much less files, say 300... I'm still talking about C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\SmartDevices\SDK\SDKTools\CabWiz.exe, version 4.0.4332.0.

After running some tests, I reached a magic number: 262. With 262 files VS2008 could create a Smart Device CAB successfully, with 263 files it gave error "x.inf contains DirIDs, which are not supported". At this point I noticed that in the .INF file that VS2008 creates and gives to CabWiz.exe, it wrote an entry under [DestinationDirs] for each added file, even if the target folder on the device is the same, as it was in my case. By manually editing the INF (using some applications that automated lines-creation...), I could successfully create a CAB for 263+ files, specifying only one entry under [DestinationDirs]. So, another limit I wasn't aware of is: VS2008's CabWiz can parse up to 262 different entries under [DestinationDirs].

Now: Windows Mobile 6 SDKs ship with a newer version of CabWiz.exe, v4.5.5102.0 and, very interestingly, it overcame not only the limitation about 998 files, but also the one about 262 entries under [DestinationDirs]. So the "simple" solution in this case was to download one of the 2 Windows Mobile 6 SDKs and use that CabWiz.exe (C:\Program Files\Windows Mobile 6 SDK\Tools\CabWiz).