Capturing and Deploying Your Own Custom .wim File

What is this video?

What is the point of doing that?

You would do this if you have software and other items that you typically install on a PC after you image it. By putting the software on a PC and capturing its wim and using that wim to deploy saves time during PC deployment and set up going forward.

This video covers the following in order:

1. Creating a basic windows usb.
2. Creating a windows pe disk.
3. Using sys prep to prepare a PC to have its image captured once you have customized it.
4. Using the appropriate command to capture your image and write it to a directory in the windows pe environment.

What you need:
1. A windows PC or VM to prep and take an image of.
2. A usb flash drive to put windows on. I should recommend 32gb or greater since the wim we capture can be large.
3. A 2nd usb flash drive to be used as a windows PE disk. This USB can be any size for the most part as this does not require much space.

Links:

CHAPTERS
---------------------------------------------------
0:00 Intro
3:13 Creating a Basic Windows USB Disk
8:54 Creating a Windows PE Disk
14:08 Using Sysprep
16:40 Running Capture Image Command in Windows PE

[paulmoesher]

Consider supporting if this video helped you: paypal.me/paulmoesher

[Ahmed-Hussain]

The whole YouTube. i found only this video is clear and smiple to capture the install.wim....Thank you

[alvinwang]

Thank you for making a detail guide on this. Really helpful. Cheers!

[liamfwheatley]

Great job Paul, very helpful information, well done

[realzguardian]

Thanks for the guide you're extremely underrated!

[brandonirwin]

Thanks for the tutorial...very easy to follow and works like a charm!

[Francoisdp]

Thanks for the detailed video. Much appreciated.

[plbwizv]

Very helpful for my project. Thank you!

[devviz]

20:04 since we already captured the entire windows instance into a .wim file we can just put it into a usb flash drive with ventoy preinstalled and boot into that wim file, save a little hassle there imo

[Ahmed-Hussain]

Please make a video on, how to skip questions while fresh install of windows 10/11, and remove bloatware and telemetry using unattend.xml answer file

[fbifido]

@21:49 - index 1 is very large 26GB
Can you look to see what's in that file?

before sysprep the OS disk used ~40GB, maybe do a cleanup before you sysprep
and do compression when moving from WIM to ESD.

[EmEhKay]

Thanks bro, this was really useful. Question though, after booting into WinPE is it possible to just export the .wim file directly into the \sources folder of the USB iso? (I did this with Win11 and it looks like they no longer create .esd files, just the install.wim)

[ozmantzur]

Thanks for that great tutorial!
One Q: in the block with Windows Media Creation tool you select the ISO file option and then using Rufus to create the flash drive from the ISO. I don't understand why not to just select The USB drive from the beginning?

[NTIS]

Great video! Can this be used to perform an in place upgrade? If for example you have windows srv 2016 wim and iso, after doing thw whole procedure, can this iso be used to perform an in place upgrade on a win srv 2012? Or it needs to be a clean install? Thanks in advance

[MrFmontero]

Hello Paul, helpful so far, the latest version of the copype Command is CopyDandI and was wondering if you have seen and chnges to the parameters (I have a core i7-8650U CPU x64-based processor, but none of the parameters work with the command ( CopyDandI x64, amd64, arm, amd64 none of them work : all say : the follow processor architecture was not found. i also tried x64.). would really help us. TY amazing so far.

[vgnumro]

hi
I am try wim image making but file install to server deploying no working

[navr]

Once we use Sysprep are we not removing the Windows license assocaited with that image? Won't we need to add another license to any device we deploy using this method?

[rocobruno]

Is there a way to circumvent the USB key and directly inject the insall.wim to an ISO so I can then put it on Ventoy ? Because, as you may know, you can mount an ISO in File Manager but you cannot directly replace the install.wim/esd directly as the ISO file is locked, meaning you can't modify it in any ways. I could use Anyburn but I wish I could use a command line tool to directly replace/inject my custom install.wim without having to go through a USB key, then re-iso it so I can put it in Ventoy...

[kixotxb]

Great video! I am so close to getting this to work. I had a previous captured .wim that was working through PXE and wanted to get it onto a USB for convenience. After using this method, I get "windows cannot open the required file D:\sources\install.wim". It seems after patiently waiting all day for the export, which was 100% successful, the.wim files opens to a .xml file :(

[jiggyfeets]

Question, If i am using diffrent machines, but it is still the same device. is generalize necessary? I have to image 30 laptops, all the same.