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Creating a custom boot image for SCCM SP2 (WinPE 3.0)

Today I had to recreate my x86 boot image in my SCCM environment. I had just upgraded my testserver to SCCM SP2 and found that the old way of creating a boot image didn’t work anymore… seeing as SCCM SP2 uses DISM.exe instead of imagex and peimg. So I went looking for instructions on creating a custom SCCM SP2 image, but couldn’t found any, so here are the instructions .

1. Start the Deployment Tools Command prompt and enter the following command:

COPYPE.CMD x86 1 c:\WINPE

When you're working on a 64-bit WinPE image use "amd64" instead of "x86"

2. Mount the winpe.wim file to the mount dir that’s created automatically:

DISM /Mount-Wim /WIMFile:c:\winpe\winpe.wim /Index:1 /MountDir:C:\winpe\mount

3. Add the packages required by SCCM to the wim (again, if you’re working on 64-bit Windows PE substitute "x86" with "amd64")

DISM /Image:c:\winpe\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:”C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_FPs\winpe-scripting.cab”

DISM /Image:c:\winpe\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:”C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\x86\WinPE_FPs\winpe-wmi.cab”

After this step you can continue adding packages (such as winpe-hta.cab and winpe-mdac.cab) or custom files to the boot image. The 2 packages worked out above (Scripting and WMI) are required by SCCM, without these packages you will receive an error during updating your boot image to the distribution points.

4. Commit the changes to the WIM and unmount the WIM

DISM /Unmount-Wim /Mountdir:c:\winpe\mount /commit             (thank you for the correction Matt!, It appears as if I was quite sleepy when I wrote this post )

5. Import your custom boot image into SCCM.

That’s it, just as simple as it was with the previous version of WAIK, only different commands

About Henk Hofs

Junior Consultant at Login Consultants. Main focus: Windows infrastructures, applications, scripting, virtualization and automation. Specialization: Windows OS deployments (with technologies like MDT, SCCM and Altiris).