Self-unpacking installers for Windows are very convenient - they don't require stand-ALONE archive software, and have a simple, STRAIGHTFORWARD flow. However, sometimes it's necessary to look into the executable file to find out exactly what files make up the archive inside it. How can we do it?I have a test machine that I use for situations like this. This system I wipe clean and reinstall from image to reset my work area in it. I use this very frequently when testing new software which may not be 100% trusted and I dont want to take any risk with my highly configured and secure system to do something stupid and introduce a problem.

I have had to do this with installers that were written for say Windows XP when I need the driver(s) that are nested within the self extracting installer and the driver(s) are needed for say Windows 7. I will run it on this test machine to be able to extract it all and select what i want to copy to a thumb drive to manually introduce to the windows 7 system. Such as I had to do this to get the correct Video Driver for a Pentium 4 system testing Windows 7 32-bit on it and the Intel 845GL driver support ends at XP and Intels drivers are self extracting installers and they complain under Windows 7 that its the wrong version of Windows and they fail to extract.

If its a program with a self extracting installer, you may or may not be able to just copy the program and its contents to another location and run the EXE, as for MANY installers of software access the system and install the software and so you might copy over the contents and find that the program wont run because it hasnt been installed to the system. It all depends on if it had registry keys associated with it etc.

The nice thing is that sometimes there are downloads available that are zip files that are stand alone or non MSI files in which you can avoid junk that was added to the installer that is unwanted.You could use 7-Zip to open the archive, look inside and extract any files you want - it won't work with absolutely everything but I use it a lot and I WOULD say 95% or more driver packages can be extracted that way.  As Dave says, very handy to extract individual files if the package won't install on a certain OS, or if the package includes a lot of unnecessary software.  No point installing a "driver package" of maybe a few hundred MB when a few hundred KB of driver files is all that's needed for the device to work, if you don't need the additional sofwtare Most archive utilities can open a self-extracting ZIP executable.

Some self-extracting programs are actually STUB setup programs which contain a .msi Windows Installer. For those, you can use a Microsoft tool called "Orca". This isn't super user-friendly because really it is a .MSI debugging tool, but you can use it to see what files are within an installer and inspect the various actions the installer actually takes before running it. The tool itself is part of the Platform SDK, however a download is made available Here.