Custom Windows Installation -- Glorious Stalemate and Wrapping Up

Picking up from a few days ago --

Success to our Friends ...

I found the time last night to re-do the image-creation process. This time, of course, I had the benefit of hindsight ("Burn me once, etc. etc. etc.") -- and so I made sure that I included imagex.exe in the WinPE image.

(i.e. -- before executing oscdimg ... --

copy [...AIK...]\tools\x86\imagex.exe c:\winpe_x86\iso\

This will make imagex.exe available in the USB's root directory.
)


And it worked! Oh, imagex needed at least 15 minutes to compile an image of my installation, and the resulting image was huge -- but regardless --

... Confusion to our Enemies ...

There was one thing that happened that was odd, very odd indeed.

After I finished creating the new install.wim, shutdown, unplugged the USB stick, and rebooted -- my Windows seemed to be broken.

That is, it would go into "New Install Setup Action Mode!" and announce that it was "Starting Services" -- and then give me a panic-stricken message that ...

"o hax could not complete setup zomg"

(At least, I'm pretty sure that's what it said.) 

Anyway, I despaired almost immediately.
But if there's one thing I've taken to heart over the years, it's that "if something doesn't work, you're obviously not trying hard enough". So I clicked "OK" to reboot.

It popped up again. I clicked "OK" again.

We went round and round three or four times.

And then -- quite suddenly -- Windows finished "Starting Services" and moved on to other activities.

I don't know exactly what happened -- but we must have had incremental fixes, bit by bit, until it Just Worked.

... God save the Queen! (if she converts)

So I rebooted into Windows, ran through the set-up and activation routines, and -- blam -- we were back. All of my user-preferences were gone, but all my applications were still there.

So I used ImgBurn in "Build" Mode to create a new ISO.

This was only a little tricky, as I'd never used this mode before. ImgBurn doesn't allow you to edit an ISO in situ, apparently; you've got to create a brand-new one.

So I mounted up the vanilla installation ISO, copied all the files into a temporary directory, overwrote the existing "[...]\sources\install.wim" with my new version, and fed that temporary directory to ImgBurn.

The one thing I was not expecting from all this was the size of the thing.

My vanilla Windows 7 Home Premium install-disk tops out at about 4.4 GB.

This custom image rounds out to 9.4 GB.

Yup, that's not fitting on my 8 GB USB stick. I'll have to order a new one.

Fortunately, USB sticks are dirt-cheap. Plus, I'm not planning on re-imaging this machine anytime soon.

So -- into the NAS for archiving!

And now I'm the richer by one custom Windows installation!

What's next?

• Re-do the custom-image process -- and archive that image! baby, oh, baby ...
• Move the CPU to a back-room/closet -- CHECK and it's AWESOME
• Get another NIC
• Make a standard VM image
• Make a flock of VMs -- a router/firewall/proxy, a NAS/DLNA server, an Apache server, ...