The downside of this method of deploying a preconfigured Windows image is that you have to rebuild the image to update any of the apps it contains. Now you can use your bootable USB flash drive to deploy the Windows image you created to any computer (you can also install Windows over the network using PXE boot).Ĭheck that all preinstalled apps are available after Windows installation is complete:
When Windows Setup installs the operating system, it merges the SWM files.
Copy these files to the \sources folder on the installation media. In this case, DISM will create four files install.swm, install2.swm, install3.swm, and install4.swm. A large WIM image file must be split into several smaller SWM files in this case:ĭism /Split-Image /ImageFile:D:\sources\install.wim /SWMFile:c:\tmp\install.swm /FileSize:3500 If you have a FAT32 bootable USB key for installing Windows on UEFI computers, you cannot save a WIM file larger than 4GB on this file system. Note that the WIM image size with pre-installed software has increased significantly (from 4GB to 10GB). In my case, I renamed the old image file to install.esd_bak and copied the new install.wim image to the USB stick. Once you have captured your customized Windows image, you can replace the original install.wim or install.esd image file in the \sources folder on the installation USB flash drive ( ESD is the maximum compression format used for WIM). Replace the Original Install.wim Image File on the USB Flash Drive It took about 30 minutes to capture the image in my case. To capture an offline Windows image from the E drive and save the resulting WIM image to the D drive, run the command:ĭism /capture-image /imagefile:D:\install.wim /capturedir:E:\ /ScratchDir:D:\ /name:"MyWinImage" /compress:maximum /checkintegrity /verify /bootable In this example, the drive containing Windows is assigned the letter E: and the empty drive is D. Identify the drive letters assigned to the Windows partition and the empty drive to which the WIM file will be copied. Using the Windows installation USB stick, boot the computer and press Shift+F10 to open the command prompt.
Capture a Custom Windows Image Using DISMĪt this stage, you will need to capture an offline Windows image from a local drive, save it as a WIM file, and place it on a separate drive (we connected a separate 60GB empty drive to the computer).īoot the computer with the referenced Windows image into the WinPE environment ( WinRE). When this process is complete, the computer will automatically shut down. Enter System Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE).Expand the Sysprep window and select the following options: The final step is to prepare your custom Windows image for deployment with the sysprep.exe tool. It’s likely that both your Ubuntu ISO and the correct USB device will have been detected and set as ‘Source disc image’ and ‘Disk to use’ in the application window. To apply the current user’s settings to the Default user (used as a template when creating new Windows users), create an unattend.xml answer file in the C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep directory. When launched, Startup Disk Creator will look for the ISO files in your Downloads folder, as well as any attached USB storage it can write to.