I’m trying to augment the Bare Metal Recovery boot image provided by EMC as part of the NetWorker Client to support recovery in our VMware vSphere environment. The BMR .ISOs include a sources\boot.wim file that I should be able to modify.
I started with these somewhat date instructions in the VMware knowledgebase. I copied the contents of the .ISO file to a temporary directory on my PE Build system (Windows 8 guest). Using the Windows ADK, I mounted the sources\boot.wim file.
C:\Temp>dism /mount-image /imagefile:c:\temp\NW-MBR-ISO\sources\boot.wim /index:1 /mountdir:c:\temp\mount
I downloaded the latest VMware Tools, then used the /A switch (administrative install) on the setup file to extract the contents to a local folder. The driver files are contained within Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VMware\Drivers. I copied that directory to my working location, then added the drivers to the WIM files.
dism /image:c:\temp\mount /add-driver /driver:c:\temp\drivers /recurse
DISM reported success, so I committed the changes and umounted the WIM file.
dism /unmount-image /mountdir:c:\temp\mount /commit
The files I copied off of the EMC-provided ISO were not sufficient to create a new bootable image. So I used the CopyPE command to create a new base image, which included a file source for the PE image as well as the appropriate boot sector files. Since the image source files were identical to the file in the EMC disk image (because this is how they created the image), I just copied my customized boot.wim over the default boot.wim. Then I was able to use the makewinpemedia command to create a new .ISO image.
I’ve been able to boot the image, and it loaded the VMXNET3 like a champ. We’ll see how the Bare Metal Recover process goes. Thankfully, this is a test and not a crisis.
