Windows’ own command line program DISM can add a lot to Windows installations and edit Windows images. An instruction.

(Image: Rudolf A. Baha)

Windows 09: How to edit Windows images with DISM First steps Convert To edit Discover further on your own Article in c’t 24 / 2020 read The abbreviation DISM stands t for “Deployment Image Servicing and Management”, Microsoft translates this as “Deployment Image Management Tool”. Since both names sound like gibberish at first and are much too long for everyday use, the abbreviation DISM is commonly used. The program lacks a graphical user interface, so it is a pure command line tool. The name of the executable is dism.exe. You can either call it up in a command prompt or in a PowerShell, but in both cases it must run with administrator rights.

When you first approach DISM, the term “image” in the name often causes confusion, so a brief explanation first: An image is a collection of folders and sub-folders as well as each files in it. It also contains metadata such as attributes and objects of the NTFS file system (access rights, reparse points such as junctions and hard links …). Therefore, an image can contain anything that is on drive C: on a Windows PC, and when it does, it is commonly referred to as a Windows image. However, an image can contain any data, such as the contents of D: Pictures Vacation. An image is an image of a logical drive (volume) or a folder on it, but cannot contain any data that originally extends over several logical drives.

Images can be stored in an archive – Package the file in the “Windows Image” file format. This usually has the extension .wim, hence the name WIM file. There are also WIM files with the extension .esd. It contains highly compressed images for distribution by download (esd stands for Electronic Software Distribution). If images are split into several WIM files, these have the extension .swm (Splitted WIM).

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