Extracting Intel NIC drivers

If you download drivers for Intel network cards from downloadcenter.intel.com you will get at .exe file. For example I just downloaded “PROWin7_64_v16.3.exe”.

If you want to inject the drivers to an image, a .exe file is no good. Here is the command line to extract the drivers to a folder:

PROWin7_64_v16.3.exe –e –f c:\Work\PROWin7_x64_Extracted

-e is the extract option
-f followed by a location tells where to extract the files. My experience is that you have to provide the full path.

Notice that you get a lot of drivers! The lazy method is to just add all of them to your image, but you can of course locate the one you need, and remove the rest before injecting.

Creating multi language Boot.wim and WinRE.wim

If you for some reason need to create a multi language installation media you need to add the needed language packs to the boot.wim file found on the installation DVD. If want to take advantage of the of the “Windows Recovery Environment" you also have to update the WinRe.wim file.

Instead of doing the guide myself I will post a link for a really good guide on how it´s done. The guide is also updated to support Windows 7 SP1.

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/12145-HowTo-create-a-multi-language-Windows-7-DVD-installer

Creating a customized image of WHS2011–Part 1

I got a comment on the post ”Installing WHS 2011 on “headless” hardware using AutoUnattend.xml” with a question in the direction of sysprep and WHS2011.

If you don’t now “Sysprep.exe” here is a short explanation:

Sysprep.exe is a tool u can use to prepare a customized Windows installation for capturing and distributing to other computers. The reason you would want to do this is if you are going to deploy a lot of systems with the same drivers, and/or software configuration. Sysprep.exe is a “Online” tool that you run from a booted Windows OS, it´s located in “C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep\”. IMPORTANT – Do NOT run this tool on you workstation, there is a good chance that you will destroy your installation. Of course, if you already have a WHS2011 that would not be a problem, you can just restore you system

If your not a IT pro dealing with tons of systems there can still be good reasons for making you own customized image of Windows. Looking at client OS it make sense to have a image with the most common software installed, and keeping you image updated with the most common NIC drivers also make things easy. Also if you are the “family go-to IT guy”, you will quick learn to love a USB stick with a couple of customized images.

When we are talking WHS2011, to be honest, I don’t see a lot of reasons for creating images, unless you plan to build/sell systems. On the other hand, I always find a excuse and this time I decided to make a image of WHS2011 with my favorite screen capture software installed.

In the first part of the guide I will focus on creating the image. In order to use the image we also have to capture it and find some way of deploy it, I will do that in separate blog posts.

Here we go…

Windows Automated Installation Kit

If you want, or need, to work with Windows unattended installations, you need some tools.

The most important ones is:

Dism.exe – A servicing tools that can be used to everything from mounting images to injection drivers and changing Windows version.

ImageX.exe – The best tool for working with .wim files. Dism can also be used for mounting/changing wim files. But ImageX have shorter command line options, and is needed for image capturing.

Windows PE – Is a very basic “core” version of Windows that you can boot to the memory. If you have ever booted a Windows Vista or 7 installation media you have been en PE, as it is the underlying OS that Setup.exe is running from. Windows PE is pretty cool, and can be used for a lot of stuff. Please remember that there are some license restrictions when it comes to the use of PE, but as long as you use it to installing correctly licensed Microsoft software it should be okay.

Fortunately Microsoft have made a single kit with these, and many other usable, tools. There are two versions – OPK and WAIK. The OPK kit is for “System Builders” and OEM´s, and the WAIK is for Enterprise Admins. The only difference between these two versions is the name, and WAIK can be downloaded without from microsoft.com so that’s a easy choise.

The WAIK iso can be downloaded from this link - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5753 

After downloadning mount (or burn) the iso file, and run the WAIK setup.

With SP1 for Windows 7/Server 2008R2 there were also released a supplement to the WAIK kit. The supplement contains some changes to the PE tools, and primary to handling of language packs. If you don’t have any contact with Language Packs, I will recommend not to download it. The “installation” is done by copying some files and folders to the right location, but is not documented very well. You can get it here - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5188

After then installation you can press start and navigate to “All Programs” -  “Microsoft Windows AIK” and start the “specialized” command prompt to start using the tools. Remember to start the command prompt with admin rights, else you will get stuck quick.