Windows® 7 Administrator's Pocket Consultant

Here’s the ideal, on-the-go reference that desktop administrators and support professionals can carry with them as they support and manage Windows 7.

DISM Tool Techniques
The Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool (DISM) ships with business editions of Windows 7. Using DISM, you can manage online and offline images of the Windows operating system, including images for deployment and those for virtual machines. Windows Image (.wim) files are used to deploy Windows 7. Virtual hard disk (.vhd) files are used with virtual machines. The same commands work on WIM and VHD files.

You can use DISM to:
--Add and remove packages. Packages can include language packs, patches, utilities, and so on.
--Enable and disable Windows features.
--Add and remove third-party device drivers.

You can run DISM at an elevated administrator command prompt by following these steps:
1. Click Start, point to All Programs, and then click Accessories.
2. Right-click the Command Prompt shortcut on the menu, and then click Run As Administrator. (If you see the User Account Control prompt, proceed as you normally would to allow the application to run with administrator privileges.)
3. In the Command Prompt window, enter dism /? to view available options for DISM.
4. To view commands available for working with online images, enter dism/online/?.

Although DISM is designed to work primarily with offline images and images you've mounted, you can use some DISM commands to get important information about the live operating system running on a computer.
For example, if you want to display a list of Windows editions to which a computer can be upgraded, you can enter the following command:
dism /online /get-targeteditions

You can customize a mounted boot or install image using the DISM utility. Available options for DISM are summarized in the table below. All components in an image are managed via the component store.

The Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool provides commands for working with WIM images. The syntax for mounting images is: dism /mount-wim /wimfile: Path /index:Index /mountdir:MountPath where Path is the full path to the WIM image, Index is the index position of the image number of the image within the .wim file to apply, and MountPath is the directory location where you'd like to mount the image, such as: dism /mount-wim /wimfile:c:\winpe_x86\iso\sources\boot.wim /index:1 /mountdir:c:\win7 You can then modify the image as necessary. To commit your changes at any time, you can use Dism /Commit-Wim as shown in the following example: dism /commit-wim /mountdir:c:\win7 Here, you commit changes to the WIM images mounted in the C:\Win7 directory. To unmount a WIM file, you can use Dism /Unmount-Wim as shown in the following example: dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:c:\win7