Recently, I was faced with a situation at work were my Vista 32-bit install was corrupted and I needed to reinstall my OS on the M17x Alienware laptop I use. Since Windows 7 RTM was just released I figured I give that a shot, only this time I was going to install the 64-bit version of Windows to get full access to all 4 gigs of RAM on my laptop instead of the 3 gigs max I had on 32-bit Windows. I download the Windows 7 64-bit RTM and burn it to disk and get ready to install. To my dismay, the Windows 7 installer would fail after about 5 minutes of hanging and a disk icon blinking on and off. I continued to try over and over again hoping it was something small, but nope it would fail always the same way and at the same spot. I finally did some research on Google and discovered that the issue might be the fact that the new RTM versions of Windows 7 doesn’t have any Raid Drivers for my machine and the reason it was dying every time is that it can’t find any drives to install the new OS to. So after more research and lots of trial and error I finally concluded that the best way to get my machines Raid driver into the Windows 7 installer was to use the Windows 7 OEM Pre-installation Kit. .
I can just tell you right now, that it took me a while to realize that in order to Slipstream windows 7 you need to use this OPK or Pre-installation kit. I am just letting you know the end result of lots of trying and failing :) So once I got the the Pre-installation kit installed I got down to business and below are the steps I went through to get all latest 64bit drivers for my Alienware machine injected into the Windows 7 installer so that it would work for me and see all my drives using the Raid controller.Also let it be known, I only slipstreamed third-party drivers. Some people think slipstreaming is only for service packs, however I am here to tell you, slipstreaming is for just about anything you want to modify on your Windows installation. Also at the time of this blog post nLite didn’t support Windows 7, so this how I got it to work successfully.
Steps to Slipstream Windows 7 with your Third-Party drivers:
Find and download all of your latest drivers for your machine (32-bit or 64-bit) depending on the installer version. Either way gather all of your drivers for your new install organized and ready for slipstreaming. Please note sometimes you can find a dedicated Windows 7 driver already, if so use that one, otherwise the vista driver will also work. However, in the case of a Raid controller I only want to use the windows 7 driver and not the vista one.
After installing the Windows 7 OEM Pre-installation Kit you will need to have your Windows 7 installation disk or .iso available. In my case I had the .iso since I used the MSDN download.
I chose to extract my .iso using WinRar but there are so many other makers of .iso extractors it will be easy to extract the iso. If all you have is the DVD, then you can use UltaIso to make a duplicate image of your disk into an .iso form. I am only telling you what In used. If you are doing the disk version you can extract the image again after you make your image or you can copy the files of the disk directly, I would recommend making the image and then extracting it.
Locate install.wim in your extracted windows 7 files and folders “\sources\install.wim”. The install.wim is the files that you are going to modify and inject drivers into using the Windows 7 OPK / DISM.exe utility. I found it best to copy the install.wim file to another folder. This way I can work on this file and know I have the original install.wim exactly as it was before I started modifying it.
Next locate your DISM.exe file. This is what actually mounts the install.wim image and allows you to inject the .wim file with your third-party drivers. It then seals the image back up and let you copy the new install.wim file back to the place you originally took it from on the extracted .iso folder in case you forgot it was ““\sources\install.wim””
In order to run DISM.exe you will need to access it from an elevated command prompt. At first I was like ok, sure run cmd. Nope. It’s not exactly like that. I finally found that an elevated command prompt means to run the CMD from the exact location of the file or .exe you are running. in my case I had to run an elevated command prompt from the location or folder that the DISM.exe was in. All I did was hold shift while right clicking the folder that container DISM.exe. after the command prompt was displayer I typed DISM.exe and it opened the command line interface for DISM. FINALLY, I was able to mount the install.wim image and get to work. This is where the actual driver injection took place, right here in the DISM command utility.
Dism Command list here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744382%28WS.10%29.aspx
How to get an elevated command prompt:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/02/09/windows-7-tip-elevated-command-prompt-anywhere/
Dism /Mount-Wim /WimFile:C:\test\images\install.wim
http://technet.microsoft.com/ja-jp/library/dd772580%28WS.10%29.aspx
Dism /image:C:\test\offline /Add-Driver /driver:C:\test\drivers /recurse
Note: This will recurse and add drivers from the organized driver folder we have in step 1.
Dism /Commit-Wim /MountDir:C:\test\offline
Copy the new updated install.wim to the extracted Windows 7 iso folder. put it back in the same place you got it from before working with it and updating it. Obviously, in order for the new installation to work you will need to overwrite the install.wim file.
Burn a new updated and Slipstreamed Windows 7 DVD that has your new install.wim. What’s funny is this is the part that actually was the hardest. In order for me to do this without just making frisbee. I had to make a bootable disk. Unfortunately just checking bootable in your disk burning software isn’t enough (nero sucks btw). You have to extract the boot file from the original disk or mounted image and then reinject it into your new .iso image at burn time. How did I do this? I used again the UltraIso utility. To be honest, this was far better than any .iso tool I found for this job of boot file extraction and reinjection.
Once I was able to burn a DVD with the proper boot file that was extracted from the original disk image, I was able to install windows 7 properly with all boot settings configured in my bios. At this point I have successfully Slipstreamed my Windows 7 64-bit install using DISM.exe and install.wim and UltraIso.
Ahh, success. It feels good to finally get a good install of Windows 7 RTM on my Alienware m17x laptop. Of course, the other alternative would have been to install 64-bit Vista and wait until Alienware decided to make a Windows 7 installer. But my experience has been Alienware support sucks. So why wait, just do it yourself :) Also, I’d like to thank my friend Tony for his support in testing frisbee after frisbee for me.
Screen Shots of the Tools Used:
Dism
DISM is installed with Windows® 7, and it is also distributed in the Windows OEM Preinstallation Kit (Windows OPK) and the Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK). It can be used to service Windows Vista® with Service Pack 1 (SP1), Windows Server® 2008, Windows® 7, Windows Server® 2008 R2, or Windows PE images.
DISM.exe is a new command-line tool that is included both in a default install of the Windows 7 operating system and also as part of version 2.0 of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK). It says one can use DISM.exe service Windows images, including both Windows Image (WIM) files and Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files. While DISM.exe is primarily intended for servicing offline (not running) Windows images, some of its functionality can also be utilized to service online (running) Windows operating systems.
UltraIso
Links:
http://www.devx.com/MS_TechNet/Article/41701
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/springboard/archive/2009/07/28/managing-windows-7-with-dism.aspx
http://4sysops.com/archives/windows-7-dism-how-to-mount-manage-and-service-wim-images/
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744382%28WS.10%29.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd799258%28WS.10%29.aspx
http://www.wincert.net/forum/index.php?/topic/4939-how-to-use-windows-7-dism-by-muiz/
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/showthread.php?t=9682