WIMBOOT for Windows 7

[zipmagic]

Hi,

I have made great progress WIMBOOT'ing a Windows 7 operating system.

I used my existing ZIPmagic/DoubleSpace framework consuming WIMLIB to make this happen. Of course, I adapted the framework to support Windows PE 3.1, to extract the existing copy of Windows PE 3.1 already loaded on the OS, etc. among other changes.

Currently, I am able to WIMBOOT any language and any bitness and any UEFI/BIOS version of Windows 7 successfully within VMware. This also includes the server edition of the NT 6.1 branch. However, real world use has been very challenging. I have run into multiple unique problems with literally every real-world test:

1) A real-world test of Windows Server 2008 R2 results in a blue screen error with WOFADK.SYS, even when I exclude the entire c:\windows folder from processing (just to rule out the matter of exclusions).

2) Another real-world test of Windows 7 x64 results in a failure to write error with WIMLIB (invalid argument passed is the entire error description) while compressing a disk on-the-fly from Windows PE 3.1.

3) Yet another real-world test results in a boot error of 0xc000000e, which pertains to a corrupted BCD registry. Attempts to repair/recreate the BCD from a Windows 7 install disk return generic errors and completely fail.

I am happy to provide a beta of my work so you can check and see what happens on your own Windows 7 installations, preferably within a snapshotted instance of a VMware virtual machine, so you can go back to a healthy state if there's any problems.

I'd like to ping any interested parties here to help figure out:

a) The core file list needed to boot Windows 7. The default list in WIMLIB is not sufficient. My tests with this regard have been largely inconsistent, despite substantial efforts at automation.

b) Any real-world testing help would be greatly appreciated.

c) Insights on how the BCD mechanism could be re-constructed successfully (so I can continue with my real-world test in #3 above). It would also help to know how to detect whether the BCD registry has been relocated to a secondary/tertiary location, such that its compression can be prevented on non-standard systems.

I'm fairly confident that at this point, a standard and/or clean machine configuration of Windows 7 is successfully WIMBOOT'able using my solution. This is what my clean machine tests with VMware lead me to think.

However, every real-world scenario that I have tested is a highly non-standard and very dirty configuration of Windows 7 - for example, system images that have spanned various different underlying hardware configurations, have been thoroughly used for multiple years, etc.

So any additional insights you might share on how to detect and handle any potential boot-preventing issues on such real-world exercised OS images would be greatly helpful.

- Simon King.

[zipmagic]

You can get the current beta release from this URL:

www.zipmagic.co/DiskZIP.exe

Please feel free to PM me if you'd like to receive a serial for use during your testing.

While the current production version of ZIPmagic (version 16.1 on zipmagic.co) is super-stable, and I have absolutely ZERO reported errors from the field months after its launch, I would exercise extreme caution when using this 17.0 branch - even on operating systems newer than Windows 7. This product is still under R&D and things may have broken on Windows 10 that used to work before.

I look forward to your insights in getting WIMBOOT'ing working successfully on all Windows 7 operating systems! Note that once we've gotten Windows 7 working, it'd also be trivial to add support for Windows 8.0 and Windows 8.1 (without Update 1) using WOFADK.SYS.

[yanh]

But don't you think CompactOS is better. I usually use a tool called Dism++ to enable it in Windows 7 . And it will add wofadk.sys automatically when you try to enable Compact for a Windows 7 . And I got this useful tool at http://www.chuyu.me

[zipmagic]

There's several drawbacks to CompactOS. For example, the data deduplication benefit of using WIM images is lost. This results in about a 10% loss of space. Additionally, the "recovery image" property of a WIM image is also very handy. This is also lost in a CompactOS type implementation.

My question is, how have you managed to enable this on Windows 7? The compact.exe that ships on Windows 7 is an older version, so it would not support the CompactOS flags. I also downloaded the tool you linked to, but it does not seem to have any UI option to compact an operating system from the UI.

[zipmagic]

So I had a chat with the author of Dism++. It was a very productive conversation until he realized ZIPmagic is a commercial product. Sadly, I don't own an island in the Pacific yet...no comment on if I own islands anywhere else

He also is experiencing #1 (the blue screen error), even with Windows 7 client operating systems. He doesn't have a fix for it either, so it may simply be the case that there's a bug in Microsoft's WoF ADK driver (perhaps intentional, to prevent its use with Windows 7 operating systems as a very powerful disk compressor).

He made some different progress with #a (the file exclusion list), but his exclusion list lacks some files on mine (which are necessary to successfully process some Windows 7 client operating systems), and my exclusion list some files of his (which did not help solve the other problems mentioned earlier, even when I broadened my exclusion list to include his files). I get the sense that there is a lot more work that needs to be done here, and it would require a lot more cooperation and teamwork than we have so far.

If you're not bothered that ZIPmagic has commercial aspects and would like to see this work for everyone, please get in touch.