8

In short: Is it possible to leverage dism to capture an image of an entire disk as-is, akin to taking an image with Ghost, GParted, PartedMagic, CloneZilla etc.?

I've got a shiny new machine and before I tear into it, I'd like an image of the disk to get back to this point today. We use MDT and are in the process of standing up SCCM so I have some exposure to dism.

I know I can use dism to create WIMs of volumes with the caveat that they have to have letters assigned, right? What about entire disks as-is?

This machine has:

  • 1 disk
    • 5 partitions:
      • Recovery 1000MB
      • System 260MB
      • Reserved 128MB
      • Primary 462GB
      • Recovery 12GB
    • 5 volumes:
      • Vol 0: E DVD
      • Vol 1: C Windows OS
      • Vol 2: WINRE_DRV Hidden
      • Vol 3: SYSTEM_DRV Hidden
      • Vol 4: Lenovo_Recovery Hidden
      • Vol 5: D USB Boot Media

The only way I can think of to capture all this is to

  • Assign letters to the hidden volumes via diskpart (sel vol n > assign > repeat > exit) resulting in:
    • Vol 1: C Windows OS
    • Vol 2: F WINRE_DRV
    • Vol 3: G SYSTEM_DRV
    • Vol 4: H Lenovo_Recovery
  • Create the initial wim:
    • dism /capture-image /imagefile:\path\to\backup.wim /capturedir:c: /name:C-WinOS
  • Append other volumes to the initial wim:
    • dism /append-image /imagefile:\path\to\backup.wim /capturedir:F: /name:F-WINRE_DRV
    • dism /append-image /imagefile:\path\to\backup.wim /capturedir:G: /name:G-SYSTEM_DRV
    • dism /append-image /imagefile:\path\to\backup.wim /capturedir:H: /name:H-Lenovo_Reco

Is there a better/easier way?

JuliusPIV
  • 178

2 Answers2

6

You can now do it easily with the new "Windows Full Flash Update", integrated in DISM starting from Windows 10 v1709

TheUnexpected
  • 442
4

It is possible, but not necessarily easy. You could use /Append-Image to capture all partitions to one WIM file and then deploy each partition with DISM from that WIM file on the other side. It still isn’t a sector-based image or a disk level image, DISM is a volume imaging tool that uses WIM file-based imaging.

Another alternative is that you could Disk2VHD the reference system and then use Boot to VHD to boot the deployed systems.

WinOutreach2
  • 481