- Downloaded
- 117.3 GB
- Uploaded
- 3.4 TB
- Ratio
- 29.72
- Seedbonus
- 61,192
- Upload Count
- 26 (23)
Member for 7 years
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Download individual Microsoft Windows files (exe, dll, sys) from Microsoft with Winbindex
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Winbindex is a new web service designed to provide users with options to download (some) binary files in different versions from Microsoft servers. The service focuses on some file types, e.g. .exe, .dll, and .sys files, and Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system.
Just point a web browser to the main Winbindex address to get started.
Type the name of a file or use the file browser by clicking in the text field on the page. The file browser lists thousands of files that the index supports.
Activate the "show" button once you have made your selection to get the list of available file versions. The results page that opens lists the Sha256 hash of each file, the Windows 10 version it was included in, and the update that it was included in. For some, it also shows the architecture.
You can filter results by Windows 10 version, update, or architecture. Click on a file that you are interested in and then the "show" button to display the manifest file, or the download button to download it to the local system.
There is one caveat: files can only be downloaded if the file has been uploaded to Virustotal previously. The download button is inactive if that is not the case. The developer checked file availability and found out that 108K files out of 134K files were indexed by Virustotal.
Builders motivation statement:
Motivation
During a recent research project, I had to track down a bug that Microsoft fixed in one of the drivers. I needed to find out which update fixed the bug. I knew that the bug exists on an unpatched RTM build, and is fixed on a fully patched system. All I needed was the dozens of file versions of that driver, so that I could look at them manually until I find the version that introduced the fix. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge there was no place where one could get just these dozens of files without downloading extra GBs of data, be it ISOs or update packages. While searching for the simplest solution, these are the options I considered:
Install an unpatched RTM build with automatic updates disabled, and install each update manually. Get the driver file after each installed update. A more efficient option would be to do a binary search, installing the middle update first, and then continuing with the relevant half of the updates depending on whether that update fixed the bug.
Extract each version of the file from a Windows package, such as an update package that can be download from the Microsoft Update Catalog or an archive from the Unified Update Platform.
Look for the driver files on the internet. There are various fishy “dll fixer” websites that claim to provide versions of system files. Unfortunately, not only that these websites are mostly loaded with ads and the files are sometimes wrapped with a suspicious exe, they also don’t provide any variety of versions for a given file, usually having only one, seemingly randomly selected version. There are also potentially useful services like VirusTotal, but I didn’t find any such service which allows to freely download the files.
Option 3 didn’t work, and I chose option 2 over 1 since downloading and extracting update packages seemed quicker than updating the OS every time. I also chose the Microsoft Update Catalog over the Unified Update Platform, since the latter is not really documented and is more obscure, and other than that provides no obvious benefits. Also, the update history is nicely documented by Microsoft: Windows 10 update history. There’s also Windows 7 SP1 update history and Windows 8.1 update history, but I focused on Windows 10.
VirusTotal to the rescue
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VirusTotal is a well known service for scanning files and URLs with multiple antivirus products and online scan engines. In addition to the scan results, VirusTotal displays some information about the submitted files. For PE files, it displays information such as imports and resources, but more importantly, it also displays the files’ timestamp and a list of sections. The latter can be used to calculate the file’s image size.
In addition, if the file was scanned with VirusTotal before, the information can be retrieved by providing the file hash. That means that for each file previously scanned by VirusTotal, the SHA256 hash is enough to deduce the correct path on the Microsoft Symbol Server and download the file.
Hope this was useful to some of our members here. Credit to original authors @ghacks & m417z
