So I guess that most people working with any kind of deployment has needed to look into a msi file at some time. Microsoft has released a really basic and wonderful tool called ORCA. It will allow you to look into and edit msi files ad a really low level. So how do I download it. Well Microsoft has made it available in the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 8.

But that’s a big download for a small file, so I googled a little and found a blog article from My Server is Sick about which files you needed after downloading the minimum package. But I felt there was room for improvement. Why not just download the files you needed. So I just looked at the internet traffic of the setup program while it downloaded and saved the files.

These are the required files for ORCA 5.0.9200.16384:

• Orca-x86_en-us.msi
• a35cd6c9233b6ba3da66eecaa9190436.cab
• fe38b2fd0d440e3c6740b626f51a22fc.cab

Don’t trust files you haven’t downloaded from MS directly, well don’t trust hashes not directly from Microsoft either. Well if the links above are broken or you already downloaded from another source. Lets make sure the files are correct. Below are the results of a md5 and sha-1 I did of the files, so you can verify the files.

MD5	SHA-1	Filename
66a357c76694681bfa6ac98445982a75	80a0b5d0f1bd6a0952ad3f22088f8b7bba8461ca	Orca-x86_en-us.msi
551f92c10adae159cae0953e4308a6bb	770471306f3c9d077a023d6c5f6bd8a43b80a084	a35cd6c9233b6ba3da66eecaa9190436.cab
59c6f89bb99d30be3a69e905e686d196	e846aec0e23cb423bd4e321d038c53d62b6fc6ce	fe38b2fd0d440e3c6740b626f51a22fc.cab