Capturing a disk image

My new servers have arrived! And happily, when I opened the boxes, I found I was mistaken about the lack of installation media in my previous post. However, I figure that it's always better to have too many options rather than too few in situations like this. Also, Dell usually includes a plain (although re-labeled) OS installation DVD (which I really appreciate), then on a separate DVD, includes all the drivers - and typically many more than are actually necessary.

To be sure, I'm glad they do it this way rather than not giving you a "pure" OS installation, but wouldn't it be nice to have an install of just the OS and the drivers your machine actually needs?

Basically, that's what this disk image will be.

So set up the server with a monitor and keyboard, then use a paper clip to open the DVD drive and pop in the WinPE and ImageX disk we made last time. Then push the drive closed again, and start up the computer.

Most computers will check for a bootable CD/DVD and prompt you to, "Press any key to boot from CD/DVD", but to be safe, check the POST screen to see if there's a key you can press to bring up a boot device selection menu. Either way, it should prompt you to press a key: do so, and you'll see a Windows 7-esque boot splash screen, followed finally by a console window over an "Aura" background.

Switch around from drive to drive to make sure you know where everything is. X: is usually a virtual "RAM Disk" with some tools we won't use, and C: usually starts the physical disks. On these servers, C: is a Recovery partition, D: is an empty data partition (I requested my single hard drive have a 80GB partition for the OS, and the rest be a separate, empty partition). E:, when I asked for a directory of the contents, shows me the expected Windows, Program Files and Program Files (x86) directories, along with other directories such as "Dell", "Drivers" and "Hotfixes". Bringing up F: then, showed me the contents of my actual bootable CD, including ImageX. Note the drive letters do not relate at all to the drive letters they will actually be from within Windows.

So, once you find your system partition (E: in my case) and your optical drive (F: in my case), switch to the optical drive, then run ImageX. For instance, here's the command I used:

imagex /compress maximum /check /flags "Foundation" /capture e: e:\OOBE.wim " Foundation OOBE" "Dell Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation (Pre-OOBE)"

"Foundation", " Foundation OOBE" and "Dell Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation (Pre-OOBE)" are all strings you can modify to help you identify the desired disk image if you ever go to restore it. They represent the Edition, the Name of the image, and a description of the image, respectively.

On my servers, it took about 10 minutes, and the image file is about 2.3 GB (2.45 billion bytes)

Now eject the CD and "exit" WinPE. Later on, you can, of course, burn the WIM file you created in the root of the system drive to a DVD if you want to get it off the physical drive (always a good idea).