Create Windows 10 ISO image from Existing Installation  

fdegrove said:

Hi,



Oh yeah, that's really confusing to Windows (not just W10) when running two Win installsl inside the same box.
I avoid that as much as possible but when messed up I install and run Sysinternals subinacl.msi to rese the default authentication permissions.

Removing the assigned drive letter to the one not in use often helps as well.

Cheers,

Thanks for your input.

I don't normally have issues with 2 OSes running on my main machine (one is GPT and the other is MBR disk). I don't get boot issues even after updates/upgrades. the problem only came up when trying this ISO creation but no big deal for me. I've seen worse.
And I do keep images so it's really easy to go back if worse comes to worse.
Just sharing what I've been through while trying this method.

fdegrove said:

Hi,

My pleasure. :)



That part I don't understand. How could that happen. Strange.

Cheers,

Yeah, I know what you are saying that's why I pointed it out. I used to get a lot of boot issues before after updates. And I think the GPT/MBR have something to do with it. They don't seem to see each other on the same machine.

badrobot said:

You may want to verify if this is an issue with one computer running 2 versions of Windows 10.

I am sorry about your issues. I cannot find a single reason why dual boot would cause those issues but will do some more testing.

That being said, I've now added a warning in both Part Two and Part Three. This from Part Two:

   Warning

Capturing install.wim from an existing installation only works on computers / virtual machines where all system elements and user accounts are located on Windows system partition C:.

If any data is on another drive, even a single file or folder be it a Save Game folder of a game or relocated Documents folder, OneDrive located on another drive and so on, the install.wim can be created but it will be corrupt. The ISO created from it will not install Windows.

Use this method in Part Two only if your complete installation is on C: drive. You can for instance clean install Windows on a reference computer, create the user accounts you want to have, install your preferred software and so on, and only move system elements to other drives after you have installed Windows using your custom ISO.

I've done some extensive testing the past few days and have not found any workaround to make methods in Part Two and Part Three work when the complete Users folder is relocated, or when even a single system file resides outsides C: drive.

This is because how install.wim will be created. DISM command switch /capturedir:C:\ only accepts one partition as argument (C: in this example). Data for install.wim will be collected from that partition; if now any elements needed are located on other drives than C: they will be missing and corrupt the install.wim.

@badrobot in your case if I understand correctly you have user data on another drive than C:. I am afraid that in that case your install.wim is corrupt, and ISO made from it will not work. It will boot but fail setting up Windows.

A Windows installation on single C: partition, all system and user data on C: will produce a working ISO. Any system elements on any other drive will corrupt install.wim.

My apologies for letting the tutorial go live without these warnings.

Kari

Hi @Kari , no worries. I can always easily get out of those issues. And besides, this is what also the forum is about. To discuss issues and warn others.
I have a feeling that the issue I had with "access denied" on my data drive is due to "accounts" which affects ownership of the data drive between 2 installed OSes on separate SSDs. It's possible that it may not be an issue when creating a clean ISO without pre-installed programs and accounts.
As for having a data outside C:, yeah, somehow after upgrading to 14986, there was an extra partition created which probably contains system files. If that is the case when upgrading/updating, then this tutorial may not be always applicable whenever a new build is dropped. But I will still try to finish the process of creating the ISO later with the install.wim I made last night even though it may be corrupted already like you said.
Thanks for the heads up!

badrobot said:

Thanks for the heads up!

My tests show that if even one user folder like Documents is moved with Location tab in Properties on other drive than C: or if one game is set to store saved games on another drive, install.wimm will be corrupted.

I understand the reason for this, am looking to workarounds to include more drives in /capturedir switch.

Kari said:

My tests show that if even one user folder like Documents is moved with Location tab in Properties on other drive than C: or if one game is set to store saved games on another drive, install.wimm will be corrupted.

I understand the reason for this, am looking to workarounds to include more drives in /capturedir switch.

Good morning, Kari and Robot.

I'm dual booting also. However, I think I'm OK, if I understand your warning above correctly. But I need to ask anyway, just to be sure:

When I clean installed Windows 10 Build 14791 on this machine, I didn't change a thing it wanted to do. More from lack of knowledge than laziness. :) However, I do have an external drive with all my data on it. I did not move the Document folder to that external drive; I simply save my data (Excel, Word, etc.) to it.

Am I correct in thinking the external drive is not what you're giving the warning about?

SIW2 said:

Data should be ok. Seems to be problem if user folders are located elsewhere.

It's also a problem if for instance Documents folder is moved to other drive than C: using Location tab in Properties, or Settings app > Storage Locations.