Managing the OS images effectively with DISM in Windows 7

Deployment Image Servicing & Management (DISM) is a new command line tool which was introduced in Windows 7 for deployment.  DISM can be used to service a Window image or to prepare a Windows Pre-installation Environment (Windows PE) image. DISM also supports more features and functionality than the other tools, Package Manager,  supported in Windows Vista, including logging, inventory commands with parse-able output, detailed help, offline INF driver package installation, direct application of MS update packages, and integration of international settings.

These how-to articles on DISM will help you understand what DISM tools can do, which were the tools it replaced, its Commands, Architecture and options.

Introduction to Deployment Image Servicing & Management (DISM)
Deployment has a new tool in Windows 7: DISM (Deployment Image Servicing and Management). DISM is a command line tool which can be used to service a Windows® image or to prepare a Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) image. It replaces Package Manager (pkgmgr.exe), PEimg, and Intlcfg that were included in Windows Vista®.

Mounting a Wim Image for Offline Servicing
Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) is a tool which allows you to service your images offline. It supports both .wim and .vhd formats. In this article, we will look at how do you mount an Wim Image using this tool!

Adding or Removing Drivers from an offline Image
You can offline service an image using DISM and add drivers to the mounted ones. You will need to download driver packages from OEM’s and ISV’s. These packages need to be INF-based packages (.exe or .msi driver installation is not available offline).

Enable/Disable Features using DISM on an offline Image
You can offline service an image using DISM and enable/disable a feature on the mounted ones. In this short article, let us see on how we can do the same.

Unmount and clean a Wim Image using DISM Commands
DISM provides you an option to load Wim images onto your local drive and the service it offline. You can either add/remove a driver, enable/disable features, perform other customizations.. without even installing them on a physical box. Now when you have mounted a Wim image, its really necessary to check if the image is mounted correctly. you can do that by running the command, dism /get-MountedWiminfo.

If you’d like to know more about this, please read this fine series of articles penned by my MVP colleague Vijay at MSIGeek.