How to Integrate Modified System Files in Windows Setup ISO?

Many times we edit system files like Shell32.dll, Explorer.exe, msgina.dll, ntoskrnl.exe, logonui.exe, etc in Resource Hacker to change the look-n-feel of Windows. For example, following screenshot shows modified Desktop context menu in Windows XP:

But sometimes we want to include our edited files in Windows Setup ISO, so that whenever we make a fresh installation of Windows, we don’t lose our changed files and we don’t need to make those changes again.

Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to include your own edited files in Windows Setup ISO:

1. Download following .Zip file and extract it:

Download File

2. You’ll get “modifype.exe” file after extracting the .zip file.

3. Now copy this “modifype.exe” file to the same folder where you have your edited files which you want to include in Windows setup. Lets suppose you have copied all edited files in “D:\Setup” folder, so copy “modifype.exe” file to “D:\Setup” folder.

4. Open Command Prompt and navigate to the same folder where your files are stored, which is “D:\Setup” in our example.

5. Now provide following command:

Replace “file_name.extension” with the name of the file which you want to include in setup. e.g.

6. It’ll fix the checksum of the file and Windows will accept the file without any problem at installation time.

7. Now the last step. We have to compress the file using “makecab” command. As you can see all files in Windows Setup folder “I386” are in compressed format like shell32.dl_, explorer.ex_, msgina.dl_, etc. So provide following command to compress the file:

Replace “file_name.extension” with the name of the file which you want to include in setup. e.g.

8. That’s it. You’ll get a compressed file, which you can safely copy to “I386” folder of your Windows setup.

NOTE: If you want to extract any existing file from the Setup, you can use “expand” command.

Replace “file_name.extension” with the name of the file which you want to extract. e.g.