[How-To] Create an all-in-one Windows 7 DVD

Okay, so I was fumbling through my software CD's and DVD's and found that I basically have every edition of WIndows 7 scattered about on several DVD's. I have seen AIO disks floating around the interwebs as Warez and torrents, but can you really trust them? Would you rather not make your own DVD containing all the editions from official disks that you might have laying around? I did, I wanted all my Win7 editions on one disk and I wanted to be sure they're clean of viruses, activation cracks, keys, codes etc, so I thought I'd get started, thanks to imagex and the W.A.I.K it's pretty damn easy. And by the looks of it, I might be able to make a bootable WIn7 Install disk from an AAO eRecovery partition. Provided of course there is a "Sources" folder in the partition, which must contain the "install.wim" file. Can someone check on that for me? It might be the key to creating a slim and trim recovery DVD.

What you'll need
* Your Windows 7 installation sources:- CD's, DVD's etc (the main thing is one full disk image, and all the install.wim files from the sources folders)
* The Windows Automated Installer Kit
* A few gigabytes of HDD space:- Each disk has an install.wim file on it, they're the main files we need, they range from filesizes of just over 1gb to well over 3gb, depending on the edition the disk is for
* Registered UltraISO or just about any other ISO image handler

Set up your work environment
* Depending on where you're setting up (on an external hard drive slow, a secondary partition or a secondary drive), you'll need gigabytes of space.
* At the root of this drive, create two folders (you can name them as you wish, so long as you can identify them as they will have individual purposes):- WINDOWS7AIODVD and WINDOWS7WIMS are what I used, so your folder structure should have X:\WINDOWS7AIODVD and X:\WINDOWS7WIMS, where X:\ is the drive letter for the drive you're working in
* While you're at it, grab one of the x86 (32 bit) edition DVD's, open it in UltraISO and copy all the contents of this disk to the X:\WINDOWS7AIODVD folder
* After that's done, and if you haven't already, download and install the W.A.I.K

Let's get to work
* Now we can get to work. We'll start by copying and identifying the WIM files. First off, open up the X:\WINDOWS7AIODVD folder which you created earlier and then copied the contents of your Win7 DVD into. Open up the sources folder. You should now be in X:\WINDOWS7AIODVD\SOURCES folder. Locate the install.wim file. Now, if it was an x86 edition, chances are it's already got all x86 editions in it. But we'll get to that in a bit. For now, cut and paste, move, or copy (I moved it) the install.wim file from the SOURCES folder to the other folder you created earlier X:\WINDOWS7WIMS. Now rename it to WIN7X86.WIM (or anything else by which you can identify it's architecture (x86 or x64, 32 bit or 64 bit in other words) and editions. Now we can identify what editions it holds.

The easiest way to do this is to open up your start menu, goto all programs, goto the Windows AIK folder, and run the "Deployment Tools Command Prompt". It will load up and look like the usual Windows Command Prompt, except it won't automatically throw you at the root of your C:\ drive.

First step is to navigate it to the WINDOWS7WIMS folder, so do the following (replacing X:\ with the letter of the drive you're working in and pressing "enter" after each line)

Code:

x:
cd WINDOWS7WIMS

Now if you were to run the DIR command in here, it should ONLY list the file you've put there, in this case WIN7X86.WIM, now we can identify what editions this image holds

Code:

IMAGEX.EXE /INFO WIN7X86.WIM >WIN7X86.WIM.TXT

About that command:- IMAGEX.EXE is the application from the WAIK that we'll be using, /INFO tells IMAGEX.EXE to output some information about a WIM, WIN7X86.WIM tells it that we want to examine the WIN7X86.WIM image we put there and renamed, the >WIN7X86.WIM.TXT part ports the output of the IMAGEX.EXE command into a txt file so we can see all the information at our leisure. Basically a command window can only scroll so many lines of text, so we need to output to a file so we can see what's in the image. Leave the command prompt open for now, we'll be going back to it later.

For now, in the WINDOWS7WIMS folder there'll be a new file called WIN7X86.WIM.TXT file, open it with your preferred text editor (mine's NotePad++). There's a LOT of code in these files, but you really only need to find a few particular lines. First look for <IMAGE INDEX="_">, the _ will be replaced by a number. A few lines down you'll see something like <DESCRIPTION>Windows 7 STARTER</DESCRIPTION>. This means that Windows 7 Starter Edition is identified by the number a few lines above it. Usually it would be 1. Now quickly scan through the rest of the file and look for any other <IMAGE INDEX numbers and any other Descriptions. Now you should understand how to identify an edition of Windows 7 by it's IMAGE INDEX number.

Now we can start building a custom INSTALL.WIM image with IMAGEX. The first edition we'll add to the custom WIM file will be Windws 7 STARTER. Go back to the command prompt and execute the following command

Code:

 IMAGEX.EXE /CHECK /EXPORT WIN7X86.WIM 1 install.wim "Windows 7 STARTER" /COMPRESS maximum

About that command:- IMAGEX.EXE is the program we're running, the /CHECK checks the WIM file, /EXPORT will extract the edition from the WIM and deposit it into the new install.wim file, replace the "1" with the IMAGE INDEX number of the edition you're adding, "install.wim" is the output file, the section "Windows 7 STARTER" identifies the edition in the installer and finally, the /COMPRESS maximum section will make the install.wim as small as it can.

Now just repeat the process to identify the next edition and add it to the install.wim. An example:-

Code:

IMAGEX.EXE /CHECK /EXPORT WIN7X86.WIM 2 install.wim "Windows 7 HOME BASIC" /COMPRESS maximum

This will add the edition from your WIN7X86.WIM file, identified as number 2, which in my WIM is Windows 7 HOME BASIC

Note:
You'll see that I'm labelling the editions with all caps, for some reason the installer doesn't understand anything but the all caps bit, so make sure your editions are HOME BASIC, HOME PREMIUM, PROFESSIONAL, ENTERPRISE and ULTIMATE

So that will take care of your x86 images, but what if your x64 images are on other disks? Simplly open those disks up in UltraISO, locate their install.wim files, rename them to something like WIN7X64.WIM and copy them to your WINDOWS7WIMS folder. Then identify the editions the same as before, and add them to your install.wim with the same code again, as always, modify it to suit the editions.

Note 2:
Remember when adding x64 editions to add (x64) to the edition name, example, Windows 7 HOME BASIC (x64)

Note 3:
Before you create your final image/disk/USB/what have you, search through your WINDOWS7AIODVD folder for a file called "ei.cfg" and delete it. This file will enforce the installer to install a particular edition of Win7. Deleting this file unlocks your Win7 DVD and allows you to install whichever version of Windows7 you want.

The result: By using these commands, I now have an install.wim file containing all 11 editions of Windows 7, both x86 and x64 editions. And it will still fit on one 4.7Gb DVD-R. What's next? copy the new install.wim file to the WINDOWS7AIODVD\SOURCES folder (overwriting the original if necessary), then create either a USB or DVD for installation. My preferred method is to open an official WIndows 7 x86 DVD in UltraISO, replace the install.wim file inside the ISO with the new one, then save the ISO to my hard drive for later use. Or you can use a program called RT7Lite to create a bootable DVD/USB insallation media.

Cleanup
Once you've verified your disk (preferably by testing installation of each edition either in a VM or on a spare HDD), you can safely close the command prompt, delete the WINDOWS7WIMS folder and if you've burned or saved your ISO, you can delete the WINDOWS7AIODVD folder as well.

Tip:
Once you've created your AIO disk, leave a copy of the ISO on your computer, this way you can easily open it, extract the contents of the disk to a folder on your drive, then when you need a particular edition, you can use this folder in RT7Lite to create a customised, slipstreamed and trimmed edition of Win 7 for use on different machines, burn it to a trustworthy DVD-RW and use it. You can then leave all your original disks locked up safely away from kids, mould and anything else that may damage your original media.

Question time: GO!