Nah I wouldn't use a recovery image. I most wanna use this for the supposed speed up in boot time on SSDs.
Well.. Think of it this way: Windows normally uses a winsxs folder that is mostly made up of hard-links to actual windows folder files. The winsxs folder itself usually is very small, bit it seems big because when you try to read the size of it, the OS reads the size of the hard-linked files. It doesn't take up that much more space on the disk So WimBoot is like loading all the normal windows files and stuffing them on a vhd and mounting the vhd when you boot. Then the winsxs folder points to the mounted image. The advantage is that it's not a normal vhd. It's a wim image which is a lot more compressed. They've made enough improvements in decompression that the tradeoff in decompression is outweighed by the significantly reduced read time from reading a single file. I assume there are also other runtime improvements like not having to constantly move files around to avoid rotary disk ping-ponging. This is because it's meant only for solid state storage. So, while it still needs some people to do some speed testing and comparison with various benchmarking tools, I'd say that yes it's probably worth using, but it won't save a huge amount of space unless you also use it as a recovery image replacement.
Thanks man. That's some very good info! I'm not too worried about it saving space or not. Just the supposed speed improvements.
That WIM compression saves a lot of space, though. More than eliminating the recovery image. Take, for example, the 32-bit install.wim in 8.1u1. That's almost 2.5GB in size (I'm using 10^9 GB, not 2^30 GiB in this post). The image that it contains is around 8.5GB in size. So just switching from loose files to a WIM will save you about 6GB. Then add in 3-4GB of savings from not needing a separate recovery image, so you'll be looking at 9-10GB of space savings. For a 120GB SSD, 9-10GB is probably not worth the hassle. But for these new "116" (1GB RAM, 16GB SSD) devices that Microsoft hopes to use to compete against Chromebooks and tablets, saving 9-10GB on a 16GB drive makes all the difference in the world.
One more question Murphy before I attempt this. This will erase my current installation right? Or is there any way to avoid that?
Of course it will erase your current installation. I don't think you're doing it right if your iso is less than 3gb.
Must have done something wrong then dang. And I'm guessing there aren't any pre made isos? M$ sure made this tough ha ha.
I've decided to start from scratch again. I know how to mount the boot.wim but here is where I'm stuck at (Mount the boot.wim from c:\WinPE_AMD64\media\sources\ and add the update msu packages) How exactly do you add these after mounting the boot.wim? Or are you referring to updating in the VM?
Add the Windows 8.1 updates to the WinPE 5.0 image: Spoiler (Note that everything you do here needs to be done with a cmd prompt that has ran the DandISetEnv.bat in the adk install folder. There's a link to a cmd /k version on your start menu after installing the 8.1 update 1 ADK) Create a bootable Windows PE 5.1 drive by adding the Windows 8.1 update package to Windows PE 5.0, and then cleaning up the image. 0. Put Windows 8.1 Update msu files in the folder C:\MSU 1. Create and Mount the Windows PE image. Code: copype amd64 C:\WinPE_amd64 Dism /Mount-Image /ImageFile:"C:\WinPE_amd64\media\sources\boot.wim" /index:1 /MountDir:"C:\WinPE_amd64\mount" 2. Add the Windows 8.1 Update into Windows PE. This is the same package used to update Windows 8.1: Code: Dism /Image:C:\WinPE_amd64\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:C:\MSU\Windows8.1-KB2919442-x64.msu Dism /Image:C:\WinPE_amd64\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:C:\MSU\Windows8.1-KB2919355-x64.msu Dism /Image:C:\WinPE_amd64\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:C:\MSU\Windows8.1-KB2932046-x64.msu Dism /Image:C:\WinPE_amd64\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:C:\MSU\Windows8.1-KB2937592-x64.msu Dism /Image:C:\WinPE_amd64\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:C:\MSU\Windows8.1-KB2938439-x64.msu 3. Optimize the image: Code: Dism /Image:C:\WinPE_amd64\mount /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase 4. Unmount the Windows PE image. Code: Dism /Unmount-Image /MountDir:"C:\WinPE_amd64\mount" /commit 5. Export the image to reduce wim size. Code: Dism /Export-Image /Bootable /SourceImageFile:"C:\WinPE_amd64\media\sources\boot.wim" /SourceIndex:1 /DestinationImageFile:"C:\WinPE_amd64\media\sources\boot2.wim" DEL /F /Q "C:\WinPE_amd64\media\sources\boot.wim" REN "C:\WinPE_amd64\media\sources\boot2.wim" boot.wim
So can this be used on a dell venue 8 pro if i change everything from x64 to x86? It has 32 bit UEFI, so is it that easy or something else that must be done?
Hello. Very good tutorial, thank you. Please help me modify the script so that the Recovery partition was smaller, eg 2.9GB or 3GB. 9GB for the tablet is too much... Spoiler Image hxxp://i58.tinypic.com/35ldf7l.png Thank you in advance for your help.