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The 16 year old Interstate MT-101 Flooded Lead Acid battery installed in my Cadillac STS 4 was faltering in the face of a vicious Canadian winter that has already reached daytime lows of -18C in this particular desolate icy hellscape.I will first give Interstate due congratulations on creating a product that was able to last this long before berating them for not indicating on their site (as far as I am willing to spend time searchng) that this member of the MT series (unlike many others, so an inference was not possible) that this model is "maintenance free" which is a cute way of saying it's a Sealed Lead Acid battery with all of the drawbacks of a Flooded and none of the benefits of a Sealed - chief among my grievances the lack of a user-accessible entry point replenishing the electrolyte with distilled water as had been my initial intention to see how much longer the battery's life could be extended beyond its already borrowed time. I would note that according to Interstate's product information page the Group 101 fitment seems to only be used by two models of Cadillac. Looking at their price list and comparing the MT-101 to the notoriously similar and broadly substituted Group 78 model of the same series, one could be forgiven for assuming the 101 configuration was devised solely to impose a 100% snob tax on new Cadillac owners.

Vicious.

This ballache was of course escalated by Cadillac's tendency to play dress-up with their components; one assumes to hide its lowly GM origins but the net result is an unnecessarily tedious process to gain unfettered access to the battery. It should be noted that Cadillacs will tend to sound the anti-theft alarm during low battery voltage events so be sure to have your keyfob out and handy and brace yourself so you don't jump straight into the popped bonnet if and when it trips. Given the Group 101 is a side-posted battery you will, by tugging the battery cable downward and pressing the socket and bolt against the terminal as you disconnect it and then pulling both away from the battery in one deliberate motion once the fastener has completely unscrewed: avoid a lot of solenoid and relay chatter (which doesn't sound terribly healthy), intermittent alarm sounding and most importantly sparking which - I am told - is not a great thing to have happening in the vicinity of a lead-acid battery that could very well be surrounded by hydrogen gas depending on the severity of your battery's misery. Remember to start with the positive cable and then negative.

You can follow this video if a visual reference is helpful:

While the gentleman in the video uses a battery maintainer plugged into the accessory port to retain settings I can speak from experience and also from an owners' forum deep dive which included input from a Cadillac assembly line worker that it is not necessary; some owners report having to re-index the power windows per directions provided on the console but this was not my experience. For fun I rigged a similar device out of a 120V to 12V AC to DC inverter meant for powering portable cooler/refrigerators and an accessory port to accessory port cable salvaged from a device similar to his. Being capable of delivering up to 5 amperes instead of a battery maintainer's typical < ~2 one wold assume it might perform better but I chose to live without it when re-installing what turned out to be a battery impossible to re-hydrate and suffered no ill effects. While the video instructs you to push the ignition button to the "on" position it is not necessary in this particular model as all accessory ports in the cabin are always connected regardless of the state of the ignition switch. Since my dashboard/ashtray accessory port fuse frequently dies (likely from equally frequent use as a good-old-fashioned lighter, like god intended) I plugged into the port hidden in the centre console.

A search through relevant owners' forums will tell you that the preferred, tried, tested and true compatible replacement BCI group size for the 101 is Group 78. Models in this format are, according to the specification, up to an inch taller but, crucially, sport side-mounted terminals (leftmost: positive). This configuration is rather scarce among automotive batteries and I imagine for good reason. I generally find side-mounted terminals annoying, mostly for their tendency to spark while you are installing/removing the cables and in the case of my STS the way they lock the questionably designed battery cover in place, forcing you to remove the cables completely to reposition it and thereby necessitating sparky fun just to get a look at the battery. However, headroom is often an issue and with an additional inch in height (again, according to the specification...) - especially on my STS where the MT-101 had crammed its cover right up against the bottom of the cowl - I was expecting to have to perform some minor surgery or rearrangement just to fit a Group 78 anyway so top-mounted posts were ruled out.

Imagine my surprise when the MotoMaster Group 78 AGM I eventually settled on turned out to have virtually identical dimensions as the MT-101. Remember what I said about the snob tax? ....yeeeeeah. But now I'm slightly ahead of myself.

In spite of the practically unanimous wisdom of the masses I performed the battery replacement due diligence ritual I always do the first time I have to replace a battery in a vehicle that is new to me. After all, unless something goes wrong you only get one chance to upgrade your battery and when you have to cope with the kind of winters I do this isn't the kind of decision one makes with anything short of certainty that you are installing the best possible option available for your money.

The process is straightforward enough:

Pull up a list of BCI battery group sizes which contains their dimensions. For this battery I used https://www.jegs.com/Sizecharts/bcigroup.html and google to fill in the blanks on some sizes that weren't included but were referred to during other research I performed.
Determine which of your dimensions is the most restricted and which have wiggle room. Note how much wiggle room that is - if you are working with a solid box or sided tray then your absolute maximums have been defined and you must work within them unless you are prepared to make modifications to the vehicle.
Compile a list of sizes that are within the limits of your most constrained dimension. For me this was the height of the battery, I allowed about an inch above the current model despite a tight fit under the cowl because I was already working with one of the shortest models.
Eliminate those entries on the list that are too big for your more adjustable dimensions. Also drop those that are smaller than your current battery or substantially smaller than your potential maximum - we're looking for an upgrade not a disappointment and volume is the key.
Rank the remaining size(s) by order of Cold Cranking Amps (CCA) and eliminate anything with lower CCA than your existing battery. CCA is the most important metric to anyone who experiences winter. CCA will vary for each size by manufacturer, chemistry, and model - even from the same manufacturer. To get a genralized idea of how sizes will tend to perform relative to one another it is helpful to find a manufacturer's listing of all their products which includes the CCA rating of as many sizes as possible. If they do not manufacture a certain size you can fill in the blanks with Google.
Make your final decision, which may include considering other metrics like resilience to deep discharge or running capacity.

Starting with the Group 101's metrics, my table looks like this by the time I've run through all the steps:

Size	Imperial (LxWxH")	Metric (LxWxHmm)	Terminals	Appx. CCA (A)
*Group 101*	*10 3/16 x 7 1/8 x 6 11/16*	*259 x 181 x 170*	*Side*	*650*
Group 78	10 1/4 x 7 1/16 x 7 11/16	260 x 179 x 196	Side	675-800
Group 41	11 3/16 x 6 7/8 x 6 7/8	293 x 175 x 175	Top	650
H6	10 15/16 x 6 7/8 x 7 1/2	278 x 175 x 190	Top	615
- Group 48	12 1/16 x 6 7/8 x 7 9/16	306 x 175 x 192	Top	730
- Group 98R	11 3/16 6 7/8 x 7 1/2	283 x 175 x 190	Top	620
H7	12 3/8 x 6 7/8 x 7 1/2	315 x 175 x 190	Top	730-800
- Group 94R	12 3/8 x 6 7/8 x 7 1/2	315 x 175 x 190	Top	730-800
H8	13 15/16 x 6 7/8 x 7 3/16	354 x 175 x 190	Top	900

The sizes marked with a hyphen (-) indicate commonly recommended BCI group sizes substituted for DIN sizes (H*). Unfortunately all the extra work brought me was a little peace of mind; I determined that in my case the best size was in fact Group 78, for reasons not the least of which included four Motomaster variants in stock the next afternoon at Canadian Tires close to me and on the routes of already planned errands.

Though I tend to buy Kirkland Signature batteries for Costco's amazing return policy I didn't notice any Group 78 AGM batteries on the photos I took at my local the other day (a necessary strategy if you are going to shop your local costco's battery inventory from home) and Canadian Tire's warranty and return policies on batteries are also excellent.

Among the most important and simplest upgrades you can make to a vehicle that operates in parts of the world that experiences the phenomenon known as "weather" is to switch from a typical Flooded Vented Lead Acid (VLA or commonly just "flooded") battery to an Absorbent Glass Matt (AGM) battery. AGMs, together with Gel Cells (commonly called "Sealed Lead Acid" or SLA) are one of the two types of Valve-Regulated Lead Acid (VLRA) format. These batteries - except under extreme circumstances of failure - do not leak, can be mounted sideways, are resilient to vibration, crank engines in the coldest temperatures, will rebound from deep discharge far better than any other lead plate format - even those that are not explicitly advertised as intended for "deep cycle" - and as with maintenance free batteries you can not (will not need to/will compromise the package if you) add additional distilled water in the future. While extremely old AGMs would benefit from that - as they do offgas hydrogen and decompose very slowly it is an entirely different context as conventional flooded batteries.

While AGM batteries cost tangibly more (from +CAD$60 and up) they are a sensible and worthwhile investment. It is not necessary to buy name brand AGMs like those manufactured by Maxima; the extreme premium they charge erases any advantage they might - and probably don't - have over more "generic" manufacturers like those that whitelabel for Kirkland Signature and Motomaster.

Even if you don't operate your vehicle in rugged, masculine climates - as your humble author does - it is still very often worth considering replacing your OEM flooded lead acid battery with an AGM when its time inevitably comes. Aftermarket electronics like an upgraded head unit, UHF radio or feeble compensatory sound-system can tax your battery especially if your alternator is older or declining. An AGM battery is particularly advisable if you find your sound system requires a capacitor inline with the power connection. Even without these additions, the longer service lifetime and higher performance can likely offset the steeper initial investment. Also, I've heard that at least once in one's lifetime it is common to accidentally leave the lights or some other component on or forget to unplug a device that has been connected to an always-on accessory port. That's never happened to me, of course. Despite what one may have heard. Yup.

Modify your Windows installer to support every USB 3 and storage controller Windows 7 ever supported!

[attachment-pjAD4H] — No device drivers were found. Make sure that the installation media contains the correct drivers, and then click OK.

The following procedure applies to all versions of Windows XP and newer (at least this is true at the time of writing, which is Windows 11) and can be used to add all kinds of software or features to a Windows installer or Pre-Execution Environment (PE). This capability has been used to bring you famous Windows-based LiveCDs like BartPE and there are numerous scripts, builders and other utilities to make the job easier, some of which I have linked to previously so I can revisit them in detail when I have time.

Background

As I had admitted in the aforementioned article, I've never had to manipulate a Windows Imaging Format (WIM) file before but ironically enough, I have been put in exactly that position today. Windows 7 predates the ubiquity of USB 3.0 by a margin great enough that even the latest releases of its installer do not contain drivers for USB 3.0 controllers: eXtensible Host Controller Interface (XHCI) implementations. Of course, OEMs have always needed to include their bleeding-edge drivers with the versions of Windows that ship with their products. A tool for accomplishing this very easily comes in the form of Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DSIM) which is handily available from the command line in every version of Windows 10 and later, right out of the box. DISM can only work with images of Windows of versions less than or equal to that of the host operating system it runs on.

Although DISM can be used to do much more impressive things, for the sake of brevity this article will limit its focus to adding USB 3.0 and block storage drivers to a Windows 7 installation USB stick - but bear in mind that with just a little creativity you can adapt this procedure to any version of windows on any kind of installation media to produce any kind of highly customized "PE" or bootable Windows environment on (typically) removable storage media. This is also what the Linux &co. world refers to as a LiveCD or LiveUSB, one of the most successful concepts in Information Technology for its applications in diagnostics, testing, repair, forensics, cluster and private computing - to name just a few...

Source Materials: Windows Installation Media

First we need to obtain our installation media. Depending on the version of Windows you wish to work with it may be available for download from the Microsoft website in the form of a direct .ISO image file download, a Media Creation Tool which will facilitate the downloading and installation of a bootable image to a USB stick or burnt to a DVD-R/RW and provide the option of downloading an .ISO image for later recording and/or intermediate modification (kinda like what we're doing now!)

NOTE: Always take special care to run the Media Creation Tool as Administrator! The tool alternates from crashing to working and back again seemingly with each version if you forget to run it as Admin from the top, but only after spending 20 minutes analyzing your existing system...

When Microsoft deep-sixes a product they really go out of their way to make finding it as obnoxious and difficult as possible, typically removing sources one at a time and leaving up many old pages and documents that contain dead links. This is, as far as I am able to determine, the case with Windows 7 which was EoL'd (End of Life'd) January 2020 and has more recently started happening to Windows 8 (though I'm sure everyone's feelings are less mixed here). I don't understand why they have to make such a point of it; they have sophisticated analytics and can tell where people are going on their sites. They know people are looking, they know the links are entirely unnecessarily dead, I don't think it's unfair to assume they are just being pushy dicks.

I would never do that to you, baby :/

In fact I'll do you two better:

If you don't already have an installation DVD, .ISO image file or USB stick/image for older versions (XP through 8) you may need to obtain your installation media surreptitiously. While I have always held that large public trackers with many seeds are not likely to be infested with malware (i.e. picking the best-seeded .ISO on The Pirate Bay) since it would become quite obvious as soon as it was exposed in the comments, likewise it may be difficult to tell thanks to the scores of imbecile commentators misinterpreting antivirus soft-hits and manifold scores more pranksters and trolls making entirely unfounded claims whether to drag a producer through the mud or "just for the lulz," as it were.

Accordingly, when I was left in the same office as a number of authentic, holographically coated and freshly un-shrinkwrapped Windows installation discs one evening I helped myself to painstakingly image and verify them at low speed to form a private collection of air-gapped, trustworthy sources. Should you ever have such an opportunity I highly recommend taking full advantage. Otherwise you will only ever be able to trust your installations as much as you trust whomever you got it from, whomever runs whatever system(s) they resided on or travelled through and that the data has remained uncorrupted whether by time, transmission or malicious third party.

Source Materials: Drivers

The specific reason I'm writing this article is quite likely the same reason you are reading it: trying to install Windows 7 from a USB stick (or a USB optical drive) on a machine that only makes USB 3.x ports available to the user is a dead-end proposition with the stock installation media. One solution is to switch media from USB to DVD, this may not always be possible: many machines (especially subnotebook/ultra-portable laptops, tablets, thin clients and rackmount/blade servers) do not ship with an internal optical drive. On a machine where USB 2/1 ports are also provided it's a simple matter of moving the installation stick or external drive to one of these. Depending on your chipset and BIOS' capabilities it might also be possible to revert all ports to USB 2 functionality by "disabling" xHCI. As Windows 7 will continue to have a harder and harder time finding compatible hardware to be installed on, however, a more permanent solution is highly desirable for those of us in a position where Windows 7 installations continue to happen with some frequency.

[attachment-y0WFgP] — A required CD/DVD drive device is missing. If you have a driver floppy, disk, CD, DVD or USB flash drive, please insert it now.

Note: If the Windows installation media is in the CD/DVD drive, you can safely remove it for this step.

*(Also applies to USB sticks)*

That raises another issue: until Sandy Bridge (the third generation of Core iX) Intel did not include an integrated xHCI implementation in its south bridge chips. This necessitated the addition of third party chips (and otherwise contributed massively to the delay of USB 3's widespread adoption). What that means for us is that where UHCI and OHCI compliant architectures could be covered by a single generic driver including full USB 3 support for any possible scenario is going to require sourcing drivers from roughly a dozen different vendors.

That's why most guides like this are happy to assume you are using one of the post-Ivy Bridge chipsets and instruct you to either unpack the Intel® USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver for Intel® 8/9/100 Series and Intel® C220/C610 Chipset Family or use the Intel USB 3.0 Creator Utility - which would be swell, if you could still get it. As Dr. Philip Yip "Dell Community Rockstar and Microsoft Windows Insider MVP" (baller swagger. respect.) helpfully explains for us:

The Intel USB 3.0 Creator Utility was a tool for adding USB 3.0 driver support to Windows 7 Installation Media. Intel have been dropped a large number of Windows 7 drivers from their servers now that Windows 7 has reached end of life. The Intel USB 3.0 utility was superseded by the more reliable Windows USB Installation Tool by Gigabyte which despite being Gigabyte branded can be used on up to 6th Generation Intel based hardware from other OEMs such as Dell, HP and Lenovo.

7th Generation Intel based hardware and later are not supported by Intel or Microsoft on Windows 7.

The Windows USB Installation Tool adds only the USB 3.0 drivers and the hotfixes associated for NVMe SSDs. You may need to however Load Intel F6 Storage Controller Drivers provided by your OEM during installation to see the SSD like I did when I tested this on a Dell OptiPlex 7040 and Dell OptiPlex 3040 6th Generation Intel Skylake System with a NVMe SSD...

Storage Controller Drivers! With thanks to the good doctor for bringing us to the second reason I'm posting this article and insisting on going the extra distance here to make a well-rounded, universally awesome Windows 7 Installation medium once, that you will be able to reach for time and time again:

The only other condition under which I have had to add additional drivers during a Windows install of any version over a two decade long career is to support a new and advanced or obscure storage controller. In particular: SCSI and SAS hardware RAID which I have to deal with all the time.

The good news is: we don't have to go hunting down every 15 year old USB 3 and SCSI HBA driver from every defunct and forgotten vendor then unpack (or install and scrape, depending on how obtuse the packager wants to be) each one. Not only does DISM have the ability to recursively scan directories and import any number of drivers automagically, some very wonderful people have done all the legwork for us by compiling gigantic Driver Packs like those for Windows versions XP through 7 found at DriverPacks.net.

Preparation

Navigate to Downloads > Latest (http://driverpacks.net/driverpacks/latest). For the purposes of this article we're going to focus on Windows Vista/7 (x64) DriverPacks. The USB drivers are contained in the Chipset pack while the storage controllers are in Mass Storage. You may also wish to include the Touchpad_Mouse pack if you have encountered problems using laptop pointing devices before (or plug in a mouse :s).

If your USB stick can support the weight I would strongly encourage you to include the LAN and WLAN packs because Windows 7 support for network devices is severely lacking and this is usually the only driver in the way of setting up the rest of the system after installation. What you need to take into account however is that combined these packs take up almost 1.5GB - and you will have to multiply that by 1+n where n is the number of Windows editions that you will be both supporting on your installation medium and also upgrading to include these drivers.

On my Windows 7 installation USB stick that's four editions: Home, Home Premium, Professional, Ultra. This comes out to roughly 7.5GB of additional space required. Also, depending on how fast your machine is, installing this many drivers to each edition can take a very long time - as you will see the process must be completed from the top, each time, for again: 1+n editions. That being said, if this is going to be your one final installer to love and to hold until death do you part I think, considering how cheap massive USB sticks are these days, I would have a hard time not making the investment right now. IF the stick I am holding in my paw right now were not already brimming with third party drivers and utilities I depend on and a blank stick is a lethally snowy drive away. As always: use your own judgement!

In the opposite direction, you can optimize your driver pack. I took a little extra time and shaved 20MB (roughly 40%) off the Chipset driver pack by deleting all the... chipset drivers; that is: all the drivers for random integrated devices and other miscellany that were not USB controllers, like USB to UART adapters. Combined, my USB and Mass Storage driver pack weighs in at approximately 50MB.

Caveat: Unsigned Drivers

It should be noted that these packs often include drivers for multiple operating systems. For example, the Mass Storage pack I am using contains a directory tree for the SERVER variants of Windows Vista and 7. In particular the Dell PERC hardware RAID controllers are only signed for use on Windows Server. Including them in my Windows 7 installation media may get me past installation but I will have to take additional steps after installation to continue running Windows with critical unsigned drivers. You may be in the same position if you use drivers that, while functional for whatever version of Windows you are using, were never signed for it; whether due to negligence or obsolescence.

If this happens to be the case for you, when you boot into Windows hold down the F8 key until the Advanced Boot Options menu appears. Select Disable Driver Signature Enforcement and continue booting. While this will get you through installation you will either have to do this every time you boot Windows or find a more permanent solution; in the case of a critical system component like a storage controller you have no alternative other than matching the version of Windows you install to the driver that is signed. I don't know about you, but I hate being told how to use my computer. Permanent solutions include:

Before Windows Vista Service Pack 1 it was possible to simply enter the following at the command prompt:
bcdedit /set loadoptions DDISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
You can use either of these utilities: Driver Signature Enforcement Overrider or ReadyDriver Plus (official homepage currently dead, make sure you trust this distributor as I have not vetted them).
Enable Test Mode. Depending on your version of Windows, perform the most appropriate (and adminny):
- Open the command prompt (cmd.exe)
- Search for cmd.exe, right-click, Run as administrator...
- Windows (Meta) Key + X, click on Command Prompt (Admin) or Power Shell (Admin)
Now run:
bcdedit /set testsigning on
If you receive an error along the lines of:
A very involved method that leverages the Windows Driver Kit for Windows 7 (possibly later?) is detailed at https://www.richud.com/wiki/Windows_7_Install_Unsigned_Drivers_CAT_fix. I can not speak to its contused efficacy at the time of this writing.

The value is protected by Secure Boot policy and cannot be modified or deleted.
You must reboot, enter your BIOS settings and forever disable SecureBoot, sacrificing any of the protections it affords.

If, like me, you can not abide the Test Mode watermark (it uglies up our screen shots and at a glance looks like we've done something entirely untoward and out of character, like pirating Windows. The gall.) there are ways of making it walk.

Execution

Meat and potatoes time. This is what you need to know:

On your pristine installation medium, inside the sources directory are the only two files relevant to our needs here: boot.wim and install.wim.
boot.wim contains the system image that is loaded when booting off the medium and from where the installer is run. Installing drivers here will let you install to devices not initially covered in the officially distributed media.
install.wim contains the system image(s) that will be installed onto permanent storage, this is the system you will boot into after the installation is complete. Installing drivers here will ensure that your actual Windows installation already has the driver files it needs to function after it has been installed.
WIM files can contain more than one image, they are addressed by their index number. This is how the multiple editions, if there are more than one, of your version of Windows (i.e. Home, Premium, etc) are rolled into the single install.wim file.

We're going to be doing a lot of mission critical work at the command line so let's make it easy on ourselves and create a simple directory tree for our project, UNIX style: no caps, no spaces, just meaning.

C:\
- C:\project
  - C:\project\backup
  - C:\project\drivers
  - C:\project\mount

Follow these steps to load the project tree:

Copy boot.wim and install.wim from the \sources directory at the root of your pristine installation medium to the project directory, right beside the backup, drivers and mount directories.
Make a second copy of the boot.wim and install.wim files in the backup directory. You are never to modify these files; they are there in case you need to start from scratch or make a new project later - at which point you will copy them from the backup directory into the project directory.
- At this point it is an excellent idea to make a DIGEST file containing one or more checksum hashes of these files so their integrity can be verified at a later date before using them to seed another project and prevent working from a corrupted origin. If you have installed 7zip you likely have the ability to generate checksum hashes from the context (right click) menu inside Explorer. You can also add file hashing options to the context menu using this registry hack on versions of Windows that provide PowerShell.
Copy all of the drivers you wish to install to your medium to the drivers directory. It is safe to leave them stacked inside their own directory trees (as provided by DriverPacks.net) as we will be taking advantage of DISM's recursion ability.
- Appropriate to your situation, where here we focus on Windows 7, delete any signed drivers that are duplicated between inferior or superior versions of your target. In the driver packs relevant to Windows 7 the only options are ALL, Win7, Vista and SERVER, therefore I simply delete the Vista directory since drivers signed for both versions are in the ALL branch and I am concerned about newer hardware, not older.
- I choose to retain the SERVER branches for those rare cases (a few dozen here) where I would like to install to an old server's RAID controller; I will be fully aware of the situation if it happens and won't need the benefit of an interrupted installation to put me in the correct mindset - but this illustrates a reason why you may wish not to include every unsigned driver you can find.
The mount directory is going to be our mountpoint for the WIM images; this concept will be familiar to all UNIX-like operating system users. Instead of a drive letter (i.e. A: or C:mounted to a directory of a parent system and are presented as a single coherent system to the user. When an image is mounted to the mountpoint you will be free to browse and modify its contents as you would if it were a regular part of your computer. For that reason caution is advisable; unless you know what you are doing you have the ability to do great harm while an installation image is mounted. Follow the next steps exactly unless you intend to experiment or make modifications beyond the scope of this article.

Everything is in its place. You understand the abstract concepts. Go time:

Open a Command Prompt as Administrator: press the Windows (Meta) Key and start typing cmd.exe but before hitting enter and after it has self-selected, click on Run as administrator in the right-hand pane of the search panel.
Change your current directory (working path) from C:\Windows\system32 to C:\project:
C:\Windows\system32> cd C:\project
You will not leave this directory for the duration of the exercise.
Let's get to know the structure of our WIM files:
c:\project>dism /get-wiminfo /wimfile:boot.wim Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 10.0.19041.844 Details for image : boot.wim Index : 1 Name : Microsoft Windows PE (x64) Description : Microsoft Windows PE (x64) Size : 985,750,801 bytes Index : 2 Name : Microsoft Windows Setup (x64) Description : Microsoft Windows Setup (x64) Size : 1,072,858,042 bytes The operation completed successfully. c:\project>dism /get-wiminfo /wimfile:install.wim Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 10.0.19041.844 Details for image : install.wim Index : 1 Name : Windows 7 Home Basic Description : Windows 7 Home Basic Size : 11,710,161,360 bytes Index : 2 Name : Windows 7 Home Premium Description : Windows 7 Home Premium Size : 12,222,587,449 bytes Index : 3 Name : Windows 7 Professional Description : Windows 7 Professional Size : 12,122,886,417 bytes Index : 4 Name : Windows 7 Ultimate Description : Windows 7 Ultimate Size : 12,285,492,779 bytes The operation completed successfully.
We will only be installing drivers to the image at Index 2 (Microsoft Windows Setup (x64)) of the boot.wim file. I would like my installation medium to fully support installing every edition of Windows 7 to ensure I can handle any license sticker I encounter in the field, as such I will be installing drivers to every image (indices 1-4) of install.wim.
First we will mount the boot.wim image at Index 2:
c:\project>dism /mount-wim /wimfile:boot.wim /index:2 /mountdir:mount Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 10.0.19041.844 Mounting image [==========================100.0%==========================] The operation completed successfully.
Then install the driver pack so that our installer can both handle being installed from a USB 3 stick and subsequently install to any supported media controller:
c:\project>dism /image:mount /add-driver:drivers /recurse Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 10.0.19041.844 Image Version: 6.1.7601.17514 Searching for driver packages to install... Found 239 driver package(s) to install. Installing 1 of 239 - c:\project\drivers\Storage\All\M\ARECA\1\arcvdev.inf: The driver package was successfully installed. Installing 2 of 239 - c:\project\drivers\Storage\All\M\ARECA\1\oemsetup.inf: The driver package was successfully installed. Installing 3 of 239 - c:\project\drivers\Storage\All\M\ASmedia\1\asahci64.inf: The driver package was successfully installed. Installing 4 of 239 - c:\project\drivers\Storage\All\M\Highpoint\1\rr172x.inf: The driver package was successfully installed. .. The operation completed successfully.
Now we unmount the image to commit the changes:
c:\project>dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:mount /commit Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 10.0.19041.844 Image File : c:\project\boot.wim Image Index : 2 Saving image [==========================100.0%==========================] Unmounting image [==========================100.0%==========================] The operation completed successfully.
Now it is necessary to repeat the preceding three steps for every Index (or "Image/Edition") that is to support our driver set post-installation:
c:\project>dism /mount-wim /wimfile:install.wim /index:1 /mountdir:mount c:\project>dism /image:mount /add-driver:drivers /recurse c:\project>dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:mount /commit c:\project>dism /mount-wim /wimfile:install.wim /index:2 /mountdir:mount c:\project>dism /image:mount /add-driver:drivers /recurse c:\project>dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:mount /commit ...
This is another excellent moment to create a DIGEST file containing checksum hashes of the new files. The DIGEST should be kept with them wherever they go, including on the installation medium. This way it will be possible to check them for corruption at any time down the road on any machine.
If you are using a re-writable medium such as a USB Stick for your installer:
1. Delete the original boot.wim and install.wim files on the installation medium; you were instructed to copy rather than cut these files earlier in the procedure to minimize risks but this requires vigilance that the new files are not copied over and renamed to avoid conflicting with the originals. Additionally, Explorer may complain that there isn't enough free space to write the files before giving you an opportunity to overwrite the originals if they still exist.
2. Copy the modified boot.wim and install.wim files (and optionally, DIGEST) to the \sources directory in the root of your target installation medium.
Oherwise, if you are burning an optical disk:
1. Using your favourite ISO imaging utility (recommendations available on the Windows Software page at foxpa.ws/windows-software) create an image of your installation disc.
2. Replace the original boot.wim and install.wim (and optionally DIGEST) files with those modified in C:\project
3. Burn the modified image to disc(s).

foxpa.ws

pitter patter on the keyboard

I Mean, Yeah... I can Always Use Another Laptop Bag....

It's Not Rocket Appliances: Selecting a Compatible Upgraded Car Battery

Electronics Workstation Checklist (Wishlist)

Obtaining Windows and Microsoft Installation Media (ISOs)

Rufus & Fido

Installer Links

Supplemental Links

Furthermore

Add Missing Hardware Support (Drivers) to Windows Install Media (DVDs, USB Sticks)