Windows 10 Brings Back Split WIM Support

Microsoft has listened. In my previous Creating Customized Windows 8.1 Media post, I detailed how to deploy a customized Windows 8.1 image utilizing UEFI with two different USB flash drives. The need for two drives stemmed from the fact that Microsoft removed split WIM support, thus resulting in a single file greater than 4096 MB, which isn’t allowed on FAT32 partitions – the requirement for UEFI boot. Utilizing two drives allowed us to UEFI boot off one FAT32 drive, but have the WIM on a second NTFS formatted drive.

Well, I’m happy to say that this feature has returned – so we can now go back to using one flash drive!

This feature was actually announced earlier in the year (March) when Microsoft had released the MDT 2013 Update 1 Preview. See this post on TechNet for the details.

I held off on posting anything back then as Windows 10 was still far from complete and I don’t like using Preview versions of products for production efforts. This month, however, Microsoft will be releasing the final version of MDT 2013 Update 1 with full support for Windows 10.

I am currently in the process of rebuilding my personal customized Windows image, and as you may have noticed in the above photo, I’m a bit partial to the LTSB edition. I’ve come to not care too much for the “Modern Apps” within Windows, so I’m going to give this edition a spin for a while and see if I like it. I’ll update with my thoughts if this opinion ends up changing.

My next post won’t take eight months, I promise. 🙂

Check back soon!