Examining Windows SIM
As Figure 1 shows, the Windows SIM user interface has five separate panes:
Figure 1: The Windows SIM user interface
The five panes of Windows SIM server the following purposes:
- Distribution Share – This pane displays the currently opened distribution share. You also use this pane to create new distribution shares, add items to the share, and close an open share.
- Windows Image – This pane displays the currently opened Windows Image (.wim) file. As we’ll see soon, you must open a .wim file before you can create an answer file.
- Answer File – This pane is where you create a new answer file and add components (groups of operating system settings) and packages (includes software updates, language packs, and so on) to your answer file.
- Properties – This pane lets you assign values to the component or package that is currently selected in your Answer File pane.
- Messages – This pane displays errors, warnings and information messages concerning the syntax and structure of your answer file when you try and validate your answer file.
The simplest way to see how to use Windows SIM is to create a small answer file using this tool, so let’s do this now. The steps we’ll follow are these:
- Open a Windows Image file
- Create a new answer file
- Add a component to your answer file
- Configure the component you just added
- Validate your answer file
Opening a Windows Image file
Begin by copying the Install.wim file (the default install image) from your Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 Enterprise Edition product DVD to a folder such as W:\Sources\Vista Enterprise on a hard drive of your technician computer. Then open Windows SIM by clicking Start, All Programs (or Programs), Microsoft Windows AIK, Windows System Image Manager.
Now, in the Window Image pane, right-click on “Select a Windows image or catalog file” and choose Select Windows Image from the shortcut menu to open the Select A Windows Image dialog box. Browse to your W:\Sources\Vista Enterprise SP1 folder and double-click on the Install.wim file to open the Windows image file in Windows SIM. If a catalog file can’t be found for the image file, a dialog box will prompt you to create a new catalog file:
Figure 2: Creating a new catalog file for a Windows image (Install.wim) file
A catalog file is a binary file containing a description of all the various components and packages in a Windows image. By working directly with catalog files instead of the image files themselves, Windows SIM can display components and packages more quickly. Clicking Yes in the above dialog box will cause Windows SIM to mount the image, process its contents (this takes a few minutes) and then display configurable settings for components and packages contained within the image.
Once the catalog file has been generated, Windows SIM now looks like this:
Figure 3: Opening a Windows image (Install.wim) file in Windows SIM
Creating a new answer file
Next we’ll create a new answer file for deploying Windows Vista SP1. To do this, in the Answer File pane, right-click on “Create or open an answer file” and choose New Answer File from the shortcut menu. A new answer file is created with no components in it:
Figure 4: Creating a new answer file
Notice what you see in the Answer File pane under Components? The seven configuration passes used by Windows Setup! (Refer back to Part 3 of this series if you need to refresh your memory concerning what configuration passes are.)
It’s instructive to examine the XML syntax of this new, unconfigured answer file. To do this, let’s first save the answer file using the filename autounattend.xml. To do this, make sure the root node (“Untitled”) of your answer file is selected, and then choose Save Answer File from the File menu. Browse to somewhere on your hard drive where you want to store your answer file and save the file. Then open the autounattend.xml file you just created using Notepad, and here’s what it should look like:
