Persistence? (remastering)

[_blue4meridian]

Excellent... I will try that method first.   Thanx.

[_blue4meridian]

Ok... I have all the frontend tools needed to edit the .ISO (Isomaster), and .GZ (PeaZip) but what I lack is a Windows frontend to edit .CPIO files.  IZArc2Go and PeaZip only extract but cannot edit .CPIO files.  All the help received has put me on the right track.  If I can edit the .CPIO then I can add the /tce/optional folder to /opt.

[gerald_clark]

You cannot edit cpio files.
You extract, modify, re-archive.

[curaga]

Why go through the trouble of trying to do all that in Windows?

[tinypoodle]

...and while going through the troubles of trying to do all that in Windows may not totally exclude that it could eventually work, I would bet that trying to remaster an initramfs/cpio archive on a non-UNIX filesystem would more or less predictably result in breakage (e.g. file attributes, symlinks).

[tinypoodle]

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/cpio.htm

Incidentally, yesterday I happened to download the latest version of peazip...
And what would come more natural than to untar peazip with... peazip (unfortunately no version newer than 2.0 of the "portable" generic Linux binaries has worked, always spitting out runtime errors).
That resulted in a non-working binary, and further examination showed that by untar'ing with peazip the executable bit had vanished, while when using tar it worked just fine.
As this refers to peazip 2.0 (Linux version) I could not know if this bug has been fixed in more
recent versions.
Based on that I would not trust peazip to directly either archive or extract files.
However, there is no such issue when feeding archives like e.g. tar or cpio to peazip for further compression, or to browse the content of archives.

On a sidenote, you appear to disregard case sensitivity, be aware that under UNIX-like environments that would never work; e.g. I can't remember ever having seen "gz" or "cpio" being capped.