Windows Deployment Server has a couple of features
that help us with custom images.
If I go to Boot Images on the left‑hand side and I take my
Windows 2022 image that I've already created,
I right‑click on it, we have a couple of interesting options.
One is going to be to create a capture image and the other is a discover image.
Discover images are for computers that do not have the ability
to boot in to the pre‑execution environment,
or PXE boot.
All modern computers have this ability now, so it's a little bit outdated.
Instead, we're just going to create a capture image.
If you've already Sysprep'd another computer such as I have,
we can take that custom image from the Sysprep'd computer and then we
can add it in and deploy it to other computers.
So I'm going to call this one Windows 2022 Capture Image,
and I'm going to click on Browse, I'll call it win22capture,
and it's going to save it as a WIM file,
which is going to be used as a boot file later on.
So I'll click Next,
and now it's creating the source image file from my original boot.wim file
that was pulled from the Windows 2022 DVD or ISO file.
And now it's complete.
I'm going to click to add that image to Windows Deployment Server now,
and just go ahead and choose all the defaults.
It will now add that in.
Now it's complete.
I'll click Finish.
Now that the capture image has been added in,
we can go ahead and switch over to the client computer and
boot into Windows Deployment Services.
I'm in my client computer that I've already Sysprep'd and shut down,
and now I'm going to go ahead and boot into the PXE boot and it
will connect to my Windows Deployment Server.
Soon you'll see an IP address that will appear,
and it'll prompt me to press F12 to continue.
And there's my IP address.
Pressing F12, it's contacting my server,
and that is the correct IP address at that 196.
You might also see it connect by name.
Next it's going to go to the TFTP download to download the PXE boot file that
will allow us to boot into Windows Deployment Services.
And there's my capture image.
I'm going to go ahead hit Enter to that.
It's now loading the files for the capture image.
Basically, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this custom image where
I've gone ahead and installed software, made some other changes, and I'm going
to upload it into the Windows Deployment Server, and that way I can use it again
with these customizations already done. And now the capture image wizard comes
up, so now we can capture our custom image. Here's the volume to capture. I'm
going to choose an image name, I'll just call this Win22Cap, and give it a
description, and click Next. Now I need to choose the name and location where to
save it.
I can also choose to upload the image to the Windows Deployment Services server,
which is exactly what I want to do.
I'll click on Browse for the local location,
click on This PC, and now you take a look,
you can see the C drive is the System Reserved drive. That's not actually
where Windows is installed. It's installed on the D drive.
However, when you boot into the server,
it's actually showing the installation on the C drive.
So this is just because the wizard is interpreting all the different drives
and assigning random letters to it. So you can ignore that. I'm going to go
ahead and choose the D drive, and I'll save it right in the root and just
call it win22cap, once again. Click Save. And now I'm going to click on
Connect so my server does connect.
I've got to add in my credentials. And make sure you use the down
arrows to do all that. I have successfully connected to my server
because I can now see my image group name.
So I'll choose the WinServer2022 and click Next.
And now it's capturing the image.
The reason you see the option for both connecting to the local
computer, as well as to the server is because if for some
reason the upload to the server fails,
then you can fall back to the local computer's WIM file and you can
just copy that up to the Windows Deployment Server.
Although I saved the files with a local D drive,
which is actually the C drive when you boot into the Windows Server,
it's a better idea to have a separate partition set up so you can
copy that file to the other partition.
But if you haven't thought of creating that extra partition beforehand,
you can certainly save it to the C drive if you'd like.
The installation image was created successfully, so I can go
ahead and click Finish. And I return to my Windows Deployment
Services server and I refresh,
we can see my Win22Cap files now there, and I can go
ahead and choose that as an installation.
So I'm going to change the name by double‑clicking on it and calling this
one Custom. So now we know it's the Win22 Custom image that has all of the
installation software ready to go. The next step would be to boot once
again into PXE for the pre‑execution environment, and this time instead of
choosing the capture image, we go ahead and choose the installation image that we would like.