How to manually apply hotfixes to the preinstall environment on the Windows installation disc

In some cases, you may need to apply hotfixes to the Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 preinstallation environment. This article describes the basic process to do this.

When you boot a computer using the Windows installation media, the Windows preinstall environment is loaded from a file called boot.wim. If you need to apply hotfixes to the preinstall environment itself, you need to manually modify the boot.wim file.

Expand the Hotfix Package

Extract the hotfixed binaries from the hotfix file. You can extract files from .msu or .cab files by using the expand.exe command provided with Windows Vista or later.

For more information about how to extract updated binaries from hotfix packages, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

928636 You cannot extract the contents of a Microsoft Update Standalone Package for Windows Vista

Modify the Boot.wim File 

Before you follow these steps, install the Windows 7 OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK), which is available in the following download:

Windows 7 OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK)

1. Open the deployment tools command prompt with Administrator privileges.
2. Create a temporary directory named SetupDVD by using the following commands:
   md SetupDVD
   cd SetupDVD
3. Copy the Boot.wim file from the operating system that you are modifying to the SetupDVD folder.
4. Make a directory to mount the Wim file by using the following command:
   md mount
5. Use the imagex command to mount the Boot.wim file into a subfolder called mount:
   imagex /mountrw boot.wim 2 .\mount
6. Copy the updated files to the appropriate directories under the mount folder.
7. Use the imagex command to unmount the Boot.wim file and commit the changes:
   imagex /unmount /commit .\mount

Modify the DVD content

1. Make a folder named Dvd, and then copy the contents of the Windows setup DVD to the Dvd folder. For example, you can use the following commands:
   md \dvd
   xcopy X:\*.* \dvd /e
   Note: In these commands, the X represents the letter of the DVD drive.
2. Copy the modified Boot.wim files to the Dvd folder on the hard disk:
   copy \setupdvd\boot.wim \dvd\sources

Create an updated DVD image

You can use the oscdimg command to create an International Standards Organization (ISO) file of the Dvd folder and to make the image a UEFI-bootable image. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

947024 How to create an ISO image for UEFI platforms for a Windows PE CD-ROM for Windows Server 2008

After you create the image, burn it to a DVD.

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