Questions about Windows 10 Manage Windows Images with Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit Exercise 2 - Create and Apply Windows Image lab

---

The lab note says Note: Drive “D” is drive “C:” that contains the \Windows operating system files. What exactly does that mean? If it is the "C" drive why don't you Type "C" instead of "D"? What does the Version 5.0 mean in the powershell command New-VM -Name PLABWIN102 -MemoryStartupBytes 2GB -NewVHDPath “E:\VM\PLABWIN102\Virtual Hard Disks\PLABWIN102.vhdx” -NewVHDSizeBytes 64GB -Version 5.0? Also what about/index:1 in the "dism /apply-image /imagefile:w:\plabwin101.wim /index:1 /applydir:C:\ " command?

@Geo
I haven't done that virtual lab myself yet, but I can answer 2 of those questions:

-Version 5.0 specifies the version of VM to create. For example Server 2019 can create VMs up to version 9.0, but if I created a version 9.0 VM in Server 2019 I couldn't move it to a Server 2012 or Server 2016 machine because they didn't support the extra capabilities added to version 9.0 VMs.

.wim files can have multiple images in them. They are referred to by their index #. There are DISM commands to see all the index numbers and descriptions for all of the images in a .wim. I don't remember them off the top of my head.

Hope that helps some.
Matt

Hi @Geo,

Not confusing at all, "Drive 'D' is drive 'C:'", lol. But it is true!

Here's what is happening. On PLABWIN101, the C: drive is where Windows 10 is installed. This is the drive that you sysprepped in the previous command, and the drive that you now want to capture an image of. This drive cannot be in use in order to capture an image of it.

To capture the image, you booted to WinPE. WinPE runs in memory and is not installed on the hard drive. This is what is known as a RAM disk. It is contained in RAM on the system, not a physical disk. It is assigned the letter X:. So the prompt you are presented with, X:\Windows\System32> is the WinPE RAM disk, where the WinPE tools, including DISM are located.

When WinPE starts, it looks at the machine and attempts to mount all drives. When it finds the physical disk in PLABWIN101, it assigns a drive letter so you can access it. It uses C: for the first volume it finds, but this is not the volume that Windows is installed on. It is that normally hidden system reserved volume that Windows created when it was installed. When we boot Windows normally, this volume doesn't get a letter assigned. The next volume is where Windows is installed, and the next letter available is D:, so WinPE assigns the volume the letter D:.

So in WinPE is actually the C: drive of PLABWIN101 that we want to capture an image of. There is an easy way to verify this.

In the WinPE cmd prompt type C: and press enter. Then type dir and press enter. You will see the following:

Then type D: and press enter. Then type dir and press enter. You will see the following:

Notice the Windows directory and the program files directory, etc. This is the C: drive from PLABWIN101. It's just that WinPE assigned the letter to the drive instead of C:

Make sure to type X: and press enter to get back to WinPE before you continue the lab.

Like @matthew said, a WIM file is actually a container file, and can contain several images. This allows us to save space and store slightly different images in the same WIM, and only having to save the common files once. If I had two images, one with Excel installed, and one with Excel and Word installed, putting them in the same WIM would mean only storing one copy of the OS files and Excel.

When you apply an image from a WIM file, you have to specify which image from the WIM you want to apply, even if there is only one image in the WIM file. You can use the name (remember when we captured the image, we named it "PLABWIN101 Reference Computer") or the index number. The index number is easier (no spelling errors, lol) especially when there is only one image, it has to be index 1.

If you want to see what is inside a WIM file, to find the name or index number, you can use DISM. Try this before you apply the image in step 9 in the lab:

dism /get-imageinfo /imagefile:w:\plabwin101.wim

You should get the following output:

@matthew is spot on about the version number. When you create a VM on Server 2019, like PLABDM01, the default version is 9.0. For compatability, you can specify a version number in the New-VM command. I'm not sure why Practice Labs chose version 5.0, these machines would be compatible with Hyper-V running on Server 2012 R2 and earlier. Might have something to do with their physical infrastructure.

You can see the VM version number in the Hyper-V console here:

You can also see the version number by using the Get-VM cmdlet on the Hyper-V host: