Month: January 2015

In Part 1 we used Hyper-V to build, update, and sysprep our custom Windows 8.1 Installation. Now we need to make some Install media!

If you’re unfamiliar with this process, or you haven’t built customized Windows media since the XP days, you may not be familiar with WIM files. Essentially, the WIM file is a compressed image which is deployed during Windows installation. (Think of it like extracting a large .ZIP file.) If you take a look at your Windows 8.1 install media, you’ll find that amongst the plethora of files, the largest will be \Sources\install.wim – approximately 3.1 GB on x64 media.

Continue reading “Creating Customized Windows 8.1 Media (ISO, WIM, Flash Drive) | Part 2”

I’m sure this is something everyone has (or will) have to tackle at some point in their Windows IT career – creating a customized version of Windows for the office, for the enterprise, or for a specific one-off scenario. I’ve gone through the steps many times, and each time I seem to do things a little bit differently.

Recently, I wanted to create my own customized version of Windows 8.1 Enterprise. This isn’t for work, it’s for me. I’m constantly having to reimage my PC(s) for personal projects, and I got tired of re-downloading all the updates and re-installing all my apps. This is something I had been putting off for a while, but now that it’s completed, I wanted to document the steps I took, and more importantly, what worked.

Continue reading “Creating Customized Windows 8.1 Media (ISO, WIM, Flash Drive) | Part 1”