wimlib

Great news!

We've deciphered the exclusions required to get WIMBOOT on ARM64 working.

The Microsoft supplied default wimbootcompress.ini doesn't quite cut it.

We had to sift through thousands of EXEs and DLLs to get a proper exclusion going.

In the end, it's just 7 EXEs, 13 DLLs, and one driver ...

Please allow me to explain.

WIMLIB captures a given file system folder, right?

So what happens when a file inside that capture folder has hard links to files *outside* of that capture folder (where outside is defined as a folder wholly external to the capture folder, and specifically is not a ...

So I have a test VM where this issue happens, and I have been using that same VM as a way to validate the changes we have been making to WIMLIB in order to ensure it doesn't fail on (intermittent) disk read errors/extractions/applications of WIMs with damaged capture blobs.

Do you have any code (or ...

Great to hear from you!

And I share your concerns 100%. While the AI has achieved:

- Ability to apply (in WIMBOOT mode) a WIM which has capture errors in it, extracting the damaged files as zero byte files
- Ability to continue verifying a WIM (via wimverify), when the WIM has one or more damaged ...

How does WIMLIB treat a file inside a capture folder when some of the hard links in that file point to an outside folder?

Are those links still stored inside the WIM at capture time?

At extraction time, are those external hard links created outside of the target extraction folder - in a relative ...

So we've got a truly strange issue with ARM Windows!

Of course, as any good issue; it doesn't reproduce on a clean installation of Windows 11 25H2 - but it does reproduce with my 4 year trusty Windows 11 (originally 22H2) VM.

Fortunately, it *does* reproduce with wimcapture , out-of-the-box. A ...

haobinnan wrote: Sat Apr 11, 2026 12:43 pm The issue has been identified and is now resolved.

So what was the issue, and how did you resolve it?

Got it working!!!

Been working on this since my last post - it's been more than a month already!

Using fashionable vibe coding, I got it to the point where it'd create a WIM that works, for a given definition of works:

- The WIM file is created and the process doesn't abort
- The WIM file can be extracted using ...

Also, here should be just the modified files, assuming Claude AI hasn't hallucinated too badly, of course: I truly hope this would be the healing salve for these kinds of (wishfully formerly) fatal read errors?