Creating a WinRE ISO with all Advanced Options

Question

Greetings!

Idrive has a very nice step by step process on how to create a WinRE bootable thumb drive here. The only difference is I'm creating an ISO file instead of creating a physical thumb drive. This is done by adjusting step 5.1's syntax from /ufd to /iso. I'm pulling the .wim file from the latest Server 2022 ISO available as of writing which is dated from January 2024. The process went fine and a test boot of my newly created WinRE ISO worked fine. However there seems to be a problem.

If I boot into WinRE on a Server 2022 with it's built in WinRE, I see 3 additional options under Advanced Options which I do not see in my fresh bootable ISO. Options missing in my ISO are Startup Repair, Uninstall Updates, and System Restore.

Boot from my ISO

Boot from Server 2022 WinRE

I figured out a way to mount and pull the .wim file from the Server 2022 Recovery Partition. The files are marked as hidden AND system files. In PS, doing a dir -h will show the files. At that point I was able to pull it and change the attributes.

However, even when I used that server's winre.wim file in a new bootable ISO, it's still missing those 3 options?

I'm confused....

Answer 1

Hello, Try below commands to help creating a WinRE ISO. From the Deployment and Imaging tools environment: Mount the Windows image: md c:\mount\Windows Dism /Mount-Image /ImageFile:D:\sources\install.wim /Index:1 /MountDir:C:\mount Copy the Windows RE image. md C:\Images xcopy C:\mount\Windows\System32\Recovery\winre.wim C:\Images\winre.wim /h Unmount the Windows image: Dism /Unmount-Image /MountDir:C:\mount\winre /Discard Create a folder structure for Windows RE, which is based on Windows PE: copype amd64 C:\resetmedia_amd64 where amd64 is the architecture of the system you are creating media for. Replace the default Windows PE boot image (Boot.wim) with a Windows RE tools image. xcopy C:\MyImages\winre.wim C:\resetmedia_amd64\media\sources\boot.wim /h Add the Windows image Copy the Windows image to the working folder. copy D:\sources\install.wim C:\resetmedia_amd64\media\sources\install.wim where D:\sources\install.wim is either the base Windows image or a customized push-button reset recovery image.