Creating Windows 7 Images with Hyper V

I have been working on creating standard windows 7 images that can be installed on physical machines (setting up developer machines) following the instructions here

This involves:

1. Setting up the operating system, installing the required applications etc
2. Sysprepping the machine
3. Using a USB drive with Windows PE to capture the image to a .wim file
4. Combining my .wim file with the standard Windows 7 installation media.
5. Using that installation media to install Windows 7

I have this all working when I build the image on a physical machine. However, for maintenance going forward I don't want to do this, I would like to use some sort of virtual image.

I have been looking at using Hyper V for this, but I can't figure out how to get the virtual image to boot into win PE so I can capture the image. On a physical machine I select from the list of bootable devices when the machine starts up, but I cannot do that with a Hyper V image.

Any ideas on how I can get the virtual image I have built eventually onto a USB drive so I can install this on a physical machine?

Thanks

From serverfault DownChapel

• Make a WinPE CD and boot from it. If you have a USB Drive already, you can pretty much copy it over (skip to step 4). Or you can setup a PXE server to boot WinPE, but that'd be much more work. Hyper-V VMs have a boot order set in the machine properties (there's no BIOS options or anything like that).

  DownChapel : Thanks for the reply - okay I have a WinPE CD, but how do I get the Hyper-V VM to boot from it? When I turn on the VM with my WinPE CD in the host machine's CD drive, it just ignores it and boots normally.

  Chris S : You don't need an actual CD, you just need the ISO. Put the ISO on the Hyper-V host's C: drive (or whatever physical drive). Pull up the VM's Settings in the Hyper-V Manager, map the DVD drive to the ISO you copied. Under the BIOS section change the boot order so CD comes before IDE. Start the VM.

  DownChapel : Excellent - that worked great thanks. I created my ISO using the oscdimg exe and attached the ISO as described and it now boots into Win PE.
  From Chris S

• Look into Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.
  You can create a lite touch install of the OS, slipstream updates into your source and script application installs so during the machine setup you can select which apps you want to load.
  Tool is free, does have a bit of a learning curve.

  Chris S : It requires that apps can be installed from the command line without user interaction; and there's plenty of apps that can't do that. It's usually just easier to create a reference image from an actual installation and modify that with updates using MDT2010.
  From Clint