I have a PC installed and ready to be sypreped, but I ran into a little problem - I am not sure how to capture the image. I googled a few things up, but none seem to fit in my situation. I would like to avoid having to create some WinPE disk to boot from and do voodoo with, or playing with network shares (got none available for this purpose anyway). Is there an easy way to capture an image of a PC onto USB stick?

Or maybe if virtual machine is easier to do it with, why not.... I usually use Virtualbox for testing purposes.

If you want to capture it as a WIM you need two things:

1. A WinPE with Imagex on it

2. A place to put the image.

There are some WinPE builders out there that can make it for you, but you'll still need to download the WAIK.

As far as the place to put the image, it doesn't have to be a network share. You can store it on another drive like a hard drive if you want.

Other free programs that make images are Ping and a version of Acronis.

If only I googled more and posted later

Eventually managed to find out pretty clear and simple enough way to copy WinPE onto prepared USB stick and add AIK tools in there, and in the end capturing the image there. Works wonders

I feel less stupid now.

Check out these OPK videos, info is there how to easily create and add imagex to a PE image (vid 4)

Edited July 25, 201115 yr by ricktendo64

Don't know of a way to capture an image without creating some form of boot media and using some appropriate tool to perform the capture.

I got it now well, thank you

Rickendo's way is a bit more ellegant than what I did, but it's basically it. Working well. Now I only need to figure the rest of my things up.

Walrus:

I am looking for the same kind of Tool to capture a master Image off a PC. It would be great if you could post a link.

More elegant? It is a video of the instructions in the document I linked to. Oh, and I provide text you can copy and paste into the command prompt so you don't have to type.

boot to windows setup disk use shift f10 to open cmd run gimagex and capture the sysperped drive

make list to skip dir u dont want to capture

Ok, I am at home for a few days and only have one PC at hand. How would I capture an image of virtual machine? I am using VirtualBox. Any ideas?

Ok, I am at home for a few days and only have one PC at hand. How would I capture an image of virtual machine? I am using VirtualBox. Any ideas?

I gave up trying to figure that one out. I could never get a VM to do a PXE boot, so I do all my work on actual hardware.

create a ISO of your boot media. Boot from the ISO and either connect ot a network share form the VM, or connect a USB hard drive to the VM then capture the image to that device/connection.

I don't use virtual box so I don't know if this is possible with virtualbox, but with VMWare and Virtual PC there are ways to mount the Virtual Disk as a hard drive and then you can capture the image from the captured drive to your image.