How To Make Vista Bootable DVD with WIM Downloaded Files
If you have purchased Windows Vista online and taken the delivery of the latest operating system via web download from Windows Marketplace, you would ends up with a few downloads with .wim and .exe file extensions. Rather than paying additional shipping and handling charges, you can burn or create a bootable ISO DVD image from downloaded Vista files with the following trick, where the .iso image can subsequently write to a DVD. The DVD created will be the typical 32-bit Windows Vista DVD that available in retail channel, and can be used to clean install.
How to make a bootable Windows Vista ISO DVD media
- Put all 3 downloaded files (namely install.wim, boot.wim and an executable X13-49120.exe) in the same folder (for this tutorial, let’s assume the files are put on C:\ else you need to modify the path accordingly).
- Run the X13-49120.exe executable. Windows Vista Setup Preparation will create a new folder “Vista” inside the folder and will populate the folder with all necessary Vista setup files which takes up about 2.52 GB disk space.
- Exit from the Install Windows screen.
- Download CDimage 2.52.
- Extract CDimage from CDimage.zip to the C:\ root directory.
- Open a command prompt shell, and run the following command:
cdimage.exe -lVISTA_EN_DVD -m -u2 -bC:\Vista\boot\etfsboot.com C:\Vista\ C:\Vistax86.iso
Bootable Windows Vista x86 DVD ISO image in UDF format will be created as vistax86.iso in C:\ or any folder you specified above.
- Burn the newly create ISO with a CD/DVD burning software such as Nero or Alcohol 120%. Try to burn at low speed (i.e. 4X) and turn on verification to ensure that the DVD creation is fine.
Visit here for illustrative guide on using CDImage GUI version to make the bootable DVD ISO.
Create a Windows Vista ISO image and DVD with Oscdimg
Another possible way to create a bootable Vista ISO and DVD is by using Oscdimg CD-ROM and DVD-ROM Premastering Utility, available via WinPE (Windows Preinstallation Environment) via Business Desktop Deployment 2007 or Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK).
- Complete step 1 – 3 as above.
- In the command prompt window, run the following command:
oscdimg -bC:\Vista\boot\etfsboot.com -h -u2 -m -lVISTA_EN_DVD C:\Vista\ C:\VistaDVD.iso
A VistaDVD.iso UDF DVD image will be created and can be used to boot the computer from DVD to install Vista.
- Burn the ISO image file by using last step above.
Visit the guide to create Vista bootable DVD using vLite.
Note: For 64-bit Windows Vista, download etfsboot.com and put it into “\Vista\boot” folder. Or users using WAIK (WinPE), the etfsboot.com can be found at %Programfiles%\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\amd64\boot\ folder. So simply replace -bC:\Vista\boot\etfsboot.com with -bC:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\amd64\boot\etfsboot.com when making 64-bit Vista DVD image.
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Entries (RSS)
June 8th, 2009 05:44
Ok so I did this this morning (6/8/09) running windows vista home premium to make a bootable dvd for vista ultimate that I downloaded using Microsoft’s Ultimate Steal promotion. I used the first option, which involves cdimage. I registered for the forum, downloaded the 47kb file and followed all the instructions. When I tried to run the command in command prompt, it would give me two errors:
ERROR: Unable to create file “C:\Vistax86.iso” of 3969318912 bytes
and
Error5: Acces is denied
It turned out that the problem was that I couldn’t let the program create a new file in my C drive. I solved the problem by having it create the .iso on my desktop. i.e. I changed
“cdimage.exe -lVISTA_EN_DVD -m -u2 -bC:\Vista\boot\etfsboot.com C:\Vista\ C:\Vistax86.iso”
to “cdimage.exe -lVISTA_EN_DVD -m -u2 -bC:\Vista\boot\etfsboot.com C:\Vista\ C:\user\desktop\Vistax86.iso” where user depends on your username.
After changing that it made the iso just fne!
Thanks for the guide!
March 13th, 2009 02:24
[...] contains files that are directly ripped from the DVD. User will have to use CDImage (for example, create Vista DVD and its illustrative guide) or other image manipulation tool to create a new DVD image with proper [...]