Windows Deployment Services: Capture an Image

Booting to the Capture Image

First boot to the network by pressing f12 and selecting the network adaptor.

Once you have done that you should see a PXE boot screen similar to the following.

Make sure you press F12 again once tells you to Press “F12 for network Service Boot”

The next screen will list the available boot images to you. Since we are going to be Capturing a Windows 7 image, select “Windows 7 Capture Image” using your arrow keys on the keyboard and press “Enter”

Windows will then load the WIM file into RAM on the client machine. You can see the name of the WIM file that is being loaded, this is always good to look at to make sure it is the correct one.

Once it is loaded into RAM you will see the “Windows Deployment Services Image Capture Wizard” come up.

Click “Next” to continue

On the Volume Capture dropdown box, select the drive letter to capture. Normally this will be C:\ and name the image as well as giving the image a description.

Press Next.

The next screen will give you an option on where to store your image. You can store it to a removable hard drive, shared network folder, or even directly upload it to the WDS server.

**NOTE**
If you do not see anything in the “volume to capture:” drop down box, something went wrong with your sysprep or the WIM capture image does not have the correct hard disk drivers installed.

Refer to “Syspreping your Client” and “Injecting Drivers into a WIM file” to correct these issues.

 

I chose to upload to the WDS, I typed the name of my machine in and hit connect. You will then be prompted for a username and password after it times out trying to connect anonymously.

Type in a Domain Administrator’s user account and password; make sure to add the domain name in front of the username.

Once you are authenticated, the “Image Group Name:” drop down becomes available. This will allow you to put the image in a particular image group on the server.

Click Next.

If next does not show up you can also just add the image manually, to do this, click “Back” then “Next” and it will bring you back to the screen where you can choose a location for the image to be stored.

Press Next to begin upload to the server.

Depending on the size of the image and the speed of the network, this can take anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours.