wimlib

Hi,

I have an existing Windows 8.1 Pro installation that was deployed using wimboot. The wimlib documentation is not clear about this, but can I capture the installation as a new wim image? The current installation is a mix of wim pointer files and "real" files as installation is already quite old and many windows updates and various other changes have been made since. I would like to capture the installation as a WIM image and use that image to deploy a fresh wimboot installation so that without data-loss I can recover around 30GB of space on my tiny tablet's (non-upgradeable) 64GB SSD.

Thanks

Yes, that is possible. You'll need to capture a new WIM file containing the main partition; then reformat the main partition and apply the image from the WIM file with the --wimboot flag.

For improved space savings, you could use LZX compression (capture with --compress=lzx).

Wow, despite over a year of updates, the new WIM is only 200MB larger than the previous one. LZX compression makes a hell of a difference, and does not appear any worse performance wise on this machine (Bay-trail Celeron N2910). This is amazing!

Can I use other (larger) block sizes too? or does the Windows WOF driver not support those?

Thanks for this awesome library and associated tools

The WOF driver does not support any LZX chunk sizes other than the default (32768 bytes).

wimlib does allow you to set a higher compression level while retaining the same chunk size (e.g. using --compress=lzx:100), but this typically improves the compression ratio by less than 1%.