By Val Bakh2.3.1 Installation images You just need to insert the Windows 7 DVD you purchased, click Install Now and answer a few simple questions. It’s done in less than half an hour. It becomes more difficult if you are an IT professional and need to deploy Windows 7 on dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of computers. Even if all the installations were identical and all target computers were the same, it would be difficult to do individual, at-home installations. It would be great if everything could be installed and configured on one computer, and then copied to all the others.
Prior to Windows Vista, disk imaging or cloning methods were not flexible. This is no longer true. You can now create logical images using Windows Imaging (WIM). A WIM image is a representation of a disk volume. Multiple images can be stored in a single.wim format file. WIM images are everything that sector-based images were not: they are hardware-independent; are only about half the size of the original data; do not destroy existing data on target volumes; can be deployed to volumes of any type and size, provided there is enough free space on the target volume; and can be modified offline. It is now much easier to deploy Windows 7 to a large number target computers than it was with Windows XP. How does it work?
We can assume that you are not limited to one computer in an enterprise environment as a result of the fact that we are now referring to it. Let’s say you have a personal computer with Windows 7 installed and connected to the Internet. Go to Microsoft Download Center and download Windows Automated Installation Kit for Windows 7. WAIK has many tools and resources. But for now, we are only interested in ImageX. ImageX is a command line tool that can capture and apply WIM photos. Copy it to a USB flash disk (UFD), or anywhere else you can access it.
WAIK contains three versions of ImageX. One for 32-bit computers, one for 64-bit regular computers (x86), and one (sometimes also known as amd64) for Itanium-based computers. You will find all three versions of ImageX in the architecture-specific subfolders of the \Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools folder on your workstation. Which version should I use? You can only use the 32-bit version if all your computers are 32-bit capable. Most computers today have 64-bit hardware. You will be more successful with ImageX 64-bit if that is what you use, even if you have 32-bit editions of Windows 7. 64-bit software runs much faster than 32-bit software. Why would you spend an hour trying to capture an image of your installation? If you can do it in half the time, why not?
You will need to run ImageX within Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) in order to capture and deploy WIM photos. WinPE is a starter operating environment that can be booted from a CD, DVD or UFD. It runs entirely from RAM and does not require installation on the computer’s hard drive. Windows 7’s installation DVD includes 32-bit WinPE. However, the DVD may contain 64-bit versions of Windows 7. On a Windows Server 2008R2 installation DVD, a 64-bit version is available. You can also create a custom version using WAIK or burn it to a CD.
After you have completed all the preliminary work, the real work begins.
Step 1: Install Windows 7
