Is it possible to add more "indexes" into the boot.wim?

[Hvergelmir]

Hi,

I have BlueCon and other tools and I was wondering whether it'd be possible to integrate these into the boot.wim of an ordinary installation disk? I imagine some sort of BCD editing would still be required even in this case.

Thanks.

 

[garlin]

Normal boot.wim has two images: plain WinPE (index 1) and WinPE Setup (index 2). The only difference between them is obviously the Setup files.

When preparing a tools USB, most users take the first image and customize it. Remove the unneeded index 2 image by right-clicking on the unmounted image, and deleting it. Next, right-click on the index 1 image and change the Flag from 9 to 2 (bootable).

Some tools are distributed as portable apps. Those can be copied to the ISO distribution, since they don't need to live inside boot.wim. You can run those apps by changing drive letters inside WinPE. Other tools you may have to copy into a mounted WinPE image.

Honestly, a tools USB is better made by using one of those rescue USB builder scripts to make a new boot.wim.

The hard part isn't working with the image, it's figuring out how to integrate the different tools. A creator script takes all that knowledge so you spend less time learning what special handling each app takes to run inside a WinPE environment.

 

[Hvergelmir]

Hi and thanks for your response. I apologize. I'm aware of the meaning of boot.wim in general and have dabbled with the ADK, too. I also know I could customize one of them (typically the first one).

I use various iODD and some Zalman-branded virtual drive enclosures, so it's not so much about how to stuff most tools into a WIM or onto the USB at all. This was more of a question to satiate my curiosity regarding the technical possibilities. Given your answer, do you have any pointers to the documentation of those flags?

My question was to see if there is a way to get more "editions" into boot.wim and I am curious as to how that looks while booting (I don't recall many options, even when pressing those function keys). As I understand it, the WIM format should be able to do just that.

Either way I got the message. Stuffing those into separate ISOs is the way to go. Still curious, though.

Thanks again for your effort and response.

 

[garlin]

As a technical point, you can append as many Windows images to boot.wim. But there isn't support in the Windows boot loader to pick a different index to boot from. The boot loader only runs the image marked with Flag 2.

To do that, you'd have to hack some solution like this one (which uses grub as the boot loader, and chains into some WIM image selector.
https://rmprepusb.com/tutorials/016-boot-to-a-winpe-wim-file-with-multiple-images/

None of this is off the shelf, so you'll have to look for outside help.