I've got this working without a SSD drive without any sort of hacks. It just seems that it isn't required. I still don't know if there's any sort of performance gain or hindrance from using Windows in this manner on a rotary disk drive. Edit: Testing on a vm disk seems to give quite a lot of the thrashing hard drive sound from when you read from many different points on the disk at once. I'm with MS on this one. I'd recommend it only for SSD drives.
You're more than welcome to try it, but the ADK lists it as UEFI boot + SSD only. If you didn't use UEFI booting, it could cause problems. For instance, with typical UEFI setups, there is a large difference in wake from hibernation when disabling UEFI boot. For all I know, doing something like this with a wimboot system could brick your system if MS never intended it.
I'm stuck at editing my VMDK file. Opening in Wordpad tells me it failed to open document and opening it in Notepad tells me to use another editor :/ VMware isn't running. You are supposed to install Windows 8.1 in VMware then after it installs close it right? I'm kinda confused.
I've done everything up to attaching the new vhd and I can't seem to find winre.wim anywhere. It's definitely not inside the recovery folder inside system32 in vhd. Did I do something wrong?
attrib -s winre.wim I believe during UEFI booted setup it moves the winre.wim to the Recovery partition or something. When you attach the vhd you need to hunt for it with system file view on... Once you find it you can attrib off the system file property and copy it to your c:\images\ directory I think I forgot to mention that in the vm instructions... I'll go add it.
Thanks for replying man. I double checked and it still isn't anywhere to be found lol. It's definitely a EFI partition though so not sure what is going on.
could execute these commands and report the result: Code: diskpart select vdisk file=VirtualDiskFilePath.vhd attach vdisk select disk 1 list volume list partition replace VirtualDiskFilePath.vhd with your vhd file name and path
Try using the search window and type in "winre.wim" and look on each drive with system file view enabled
Did a search and no results were found :/ Show hidden files is checked and show protected system files is on so I'm not sure man. I don't know what I would have done wrong. Is it possible to download that file anywhere? I guess that would defeat the purpose of this ha ha.
Well unless you started with a version that had it removed, I dunno if I can help you... Try mounting the index of the pre-install version and copy/pasting that winre.wim The point of moving the one in the capture was to reduce the size of the wim since you'd move the winre.wim anyway. Having the file floating around somewhere extra won't hurt your wimboot at all, it's just not necessary to have it captured since you'll move it elsewhere and not let windows setup move it for you.
Hmmm could it be the fact I'm not running in EFI mode on my PC even though I did of course in the VM. Or because I'm using Professional and not Enterprise?
It shouldn't matter. I'm pretty sure that you could use the wimboot images and creation methods regardless of the boot method or drive type. I just wouldn't recommend it as I tested the resulting image on a vhd using my rotary drive and it was ping-ponging around like you'd expect. It lives up to it's recommendation that you should only use it on a SSD for sure.
Oh I'm definitely using it on my SSD. I'm just confused as to why I can't find that Winre.wim file. Though I Googled it and it seems to be a common problem for some reason.
If you haven't set up a tools or recovery partition with winre.wim then the OS has set it up for you on your OS drive. If you run "reagentc /info" from an Administrator cmd prompt it will show you the HIDDEN path. Usually from c:\some guid blah \etc..\winre.wim