Chris Nackers Blog

Combining multiple images into a single .wim file – Part 1 – Capturing the Image(s)

This information is provided as is, this can be a complicated process, so you do so at your own risk. I am also unsure of what level of “supported-ness” (i think i made that word up) this has by Microsoft, so again, you do so at your own risk. :)

Now that we’ve stated the usual stuff, lets begin….

Here are the steps I used to combine my multiple images into a single .wim.  In my case this is an XP ACPI image, XP Advanced ACPI image, and a XP Tablet image.

Before i ran sysprep and any of my virtual machines to capture them, i always stop the SMS client service and clean the SMS certificate first:

This is the sysprep command we want to run on our reference machine(s) (a virtual machine in my case):

Sysprep running:

Once the machine has been shutdown, then boot from your WinPE CD, I’m using the generic OSD cd created by MDT 2008 workbench that i’ve added imagex support to:

Imagex capturing the 1st image, i mapped a Z: drive to my laptop to upload the images to:

Making progress, we’ve got our first capture completed:

So now I need to revert to a snapshot so i can switch my HAL and create my Advanced APCI Image. I’ll skip the first few screenshots on this, since i’m basically do the same thing until i get to the winpe environment again.

Original HAL type:

My new HAL type, yet another reason that building your reference image in a virtual machine is the way to go, try this on a physical machine :)

After i sysprep’d the machine and booted my generic OSD disk with imagex support, I ran the append command to add the 2nd image contents to the original .wim we captured:

And now we have our appended image results:

Now here is a screenshot to show the differences.  So what i did prior to the append capture is i created a stand-alone capture of our 2nd image (Advanced APCI) to show the size differences. So my original xpimage_1.wim before the append was the same size as you see for xpimage2.wim, so now i’ve combined xpimage_1.wim with the data in xpimage2.wim and you see it has only grown a few megs.  Very cool!

Here is the information on the new xpimage_1.wim file provided by the /info command, you can see there are 2 images in the .wim file:

You can see the names of the individual images and that we do in fact have 2 images within the single .wim file.  Again, very cool!

So now i’m going to go one step further and add my Tablet image as well:

Here is my tablet VM loaded up, just need to login and run sysprep:

Again, sysprep doing it’s thing on the machine:

Again, i’m going to do a stand-alone capture first, so i can show the size difference (real world).  Here is the size of my tablet reference image:

Now we’ll append the xpimage_1.wim with the tablet image which will now be our 3rd image in that .wim file

Here we can see the new xpimage_1.wim has grown again now that we have the tablet image integrated as well:

Here again we can see the results of our /info command and see that we do in fact have all 3 images in the single .wim file:

So there we go, we have successfully integrated 3 separate images into a single .wim file.

In “Part 2” i will cover modifying the Task Sequence.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

-Chris

 Here are the direct links for the 2 larger /info screen shots.

All 3 images:

http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/cnackers/ximage_info_1.jpg

2 images:

http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/cnackers/ximage_info_2.jpg