wimlib

Is it ok to apply a wim when booted from a Windows PE ?

I recently applied a wim image that had the Windows drive to a partition, I booted to a Windows 11 PE and then used wimlib to apply he image, The system did not boot. I tried re-creating the boot files, did not help.

When I applied the same wim from regular Windows , Windows ran fine from the applied files.

This should be fine to do, I've done it myself.

It's a bit unclear of what was done and what happened. Do you know what the booting error was that you received? At least? Did you lay down the image to a new drive or the same drive? Did you completely erase the drive first if it was an old drive? You said you recreated the boot files how?


What I'm thinking in my head is that you backed up the partition, went to put it on a new drive and it didn't boot, which it shouldn't. There is an EFI partition which windows actually boots rom and BCD points to windows in another partition but this pointer is to that specific partition by GUID and needs to be set again if that partition is destroyed.