0

(continued as a hopefully more concise and focused rewrite of my older post)

Given an existing installation of Windows 10 on a disk, is it possible to use the DISM tool to capture it and apply it to an arbitrary NTFS partition on another disk? That is to say, does the answer to this post (capture, apply, bcdboot, profit) suffice in this situation? Capturing and applying images is the obvious purpose of DISM, but I cannot find any answers on whether such images can be deployed to arbitrary locations.

Assume that the target machines are identical in terms of hardware (actually, one of them is the same machine itself, just using a different disk), and that all of the target partitions have the same size as the source installation, but not necessarily the same sector offset.

Mona the Monad
  • 407
  • 6
  • 13
  • DISM can only be used to create an images of an entire partition. Image of a partition is created, image is applied to a partition of the same size, partition will be identical to that of the source partition. – Ramhound Feb 07 '20 at 18:17
  • That is my intent. I only want to capture my Windows partition to be [re]deployed elsewhere. – Mona the Monad Feb 07 '20 at 18:21
  • The use of DISM can be scripted. I don’t understand your question – Ramhound Feb 07 '20 at 18:22
  • Given an existing Windows 10 installation on, say, /dev/sda42, and a blank NTFS partition on /dev/sdb23 (of the same size, but not block offset), can I just use DISM to capture the source image, apply it to the target partition, and bcdboot it to make it bootable? The intent of the question is to ask whether such WIM images can be applied to any target partition (of appropriate size). – Mona the Monad Feb 07 '20 at 18:28
  • That’s typically how these images are used. A script creates the partitions, script applies the images to each partition, system is rebooted in order to finish the initializing the OS. – Ramhound Feb 07 '20 at 18:35
  • Oh, good, that's what I wanted to find out. I was planning on doing that today. I asked this question because I tried a different way of cloning, namely ntfsclone instead of dism, and that didn't work. – Mona the Monad Feb 07 '20 at 18:37

0 Answers0