ADK 8.1 dism and component removal

[eveafterdark]

Hello everyone,

I was just wondering if anybody came across the problem I had today using wintoolkit and ADK 8.1 Preview.

I have an x64 VAIO which runs Win7 SP1 x64 Ultimate, a pretty fresh install, nothing except for IE10, office 2013, 7 zip + a few required updates/hotfixes.

Today I installed ADK 8.1 Preview which features the new DISM 6.3.9431.0. Installing netframework 4.5 (also a preview) was required to install ADK.

I  installed  WinToolkit and tried to do some customizing on a win7 sp1 x64 ultimate (digital river disc).

I mounted install.wim using cmd (by the way, very fast with amd64 dism)  and then went on to WinToolkit's  component remover. The component remover finds the already mounted image and after pressing "select" it tries to load  it. And here's where the problem is:

Normally the whole process of getting the list of packages takes 3-4 minutes but here it started with "checking if the wim is mounted" (the message on the bar). This lasted around 20 minutes, meantime it gave me an error ("The exception unknown software exception 0x40000015 occurred in the application at location 0xfe94aa8e"). Some other time the application just didn't respond and crashed and generally during this process of "checking if the wim is mounted" I was unable to even open an explorer window.

Anyway, this time after "checking if the wim is mounted" it went on to "getting/unhidding packages", all that stuff. It lasted another 15 minutes and finally got me the list.

The list, however, consisted only of few things: themes, remove winsxs, remove upgrade folder, that stuff, no other packages listed.

I have no idea why the component remover does "checking if the wim is mounted", and why it all takes so long and then the list is missing all the packages.

If I mount the image directly via WinToolkit something like this never happens. Also, when I mount the image with e.g. gImageX and then go to Wintoolkit to process the image, everything is fine.

I used to do a lot of mounting directly in Wintoolkit as well as mounting the image with command line and the go to wintoolkit. Never have had such a  problem before, though I used WAIK at that time.

By the way, when I use the ADK 8.1 dism commandline, it works fine, it's fast. All the get-packages/features, mounting, anything I tried was OK.

I don't know which version of dism is being used by Wintoolkit or wether it matters at all.

Any idea what the problem may be? is it possible that the new dism is different or mounts the image in a different way? maybe it is the 4.5 framework?

 

Cheers

eveafterdark

[ricktendo]

I have had problems integrating drivers into 8.1 with the default (included with Win8.0) DISM, that means its possible there are problems integrating/removing stuff on a Win7 image using 8.1 ADK

[Mr_Smartepants]

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39306

I'm guessing that ADK 8.1 isn't final yet since its title says it's for "Windows 8.1 Preview".  I'm having problems servicing WS2012r2 testing isos with it.

The ADK toolset should be backwards compatible to service OS builds going back as far as Vista.  It must be installed on Win7 or higher.

[eveafterdark]

Thank you guys.

I installed ADK 8.0 and had more less the same problems servicing offline Win 7 image as with 8.1

plus found the very mounting/unmounting process slower than with 8.1. When I tried to use Wintoolkit on a mounted image (component removal) I had the same situation as I described in the first post (when using ADK 8.1)

Also, I tried to remove components with install_wim_tweak after I mounted the image with cmd line, and the whole process of removing just froze at some time and that was it.

I didn't try to remove packages with dism commands so I can't say how it works with ADK 8.0

I guess the whole backwards compatibility just doesn't work that well, at least with me running x64 Win 7SP1 and trying to service the offline Win 7 image.

Anyway, I'm back to the good ol' WAIK :-)

Cheers