Creating Windows 7 Images with Hyper V

hyper-vimagingwindows 7

I have been working on creating standard windows 7 images that can be installed on physical machines (setting up developer machines) following the instructions here

This involves:

  1. Setting up the operating system, installing the required applications etc
  2. Sysprepping the machine
  3. Using a USB drive with Windows PE to capture the image to a .wim file
  4. Combining my .wim file with the standard Windows 7 installation media.
  5. Using that installation media to install Windows 7

I have this all working when I build the image on a physical machine. However, for maintenance going forward I don't want to do this, I would like to use some sort of virtual image.

I have been looking at using Hyper V for this, but I can't figure out how to get the virtual image to boot into win PE so I can capture the image. On a physical machine I select from the list of bootable devices when the machine starts up, but I cannot do that with a Hyper V image.

Any ideas on how I can get the virtual image I have built eventually onto a USB drive so I can install this on a physical machine?

Thanks

Best Answer

Make a WinPE CD and boot from it. If you have a USB Drive already, you can pretty much copy it over (skip to step 4). Or you can setup a PXE server to boot WinPE, but that'd be much more work. Hyper-V VMs have a boot order set in the machine properties (there's no BIOS options or anything like that).

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