What is DISM?
Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM.exe) is a command-line tool that can be used to service and prepare Windows images, including those used for Windows PE, Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and Windows Setup. DISM can be used to service a Windows image (.wim) or a virtual hard disk (.vhd or .vhdx).
DISM comes built into Windows and is available through the command line or from Windows PowerShell. See our other article.
Image Requirements
DISM can be used to mount and service a Windows image from a .wim file, .ffu file, .vhd file, or a .vhdx file and also to update a running operating system. It can be used with older Windows image files (.wim files). However, it cannot be used with Windows images that are more recent than the installed version of DISM.
For a complete technical description of WIM, see the Windows Imaging File Format (WIM) white paper.
DISM can be used to service Windows images starting with Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and their associated versions of WinPE and WinRE. The commands and options that are available for servicing an image depend on which Windows operating system you are servicing, and whether the image is offline or a currently running operating system.
For a list of the supported platforms and architecture types, see DISM Supported Platforms.
- Mount image:
DISM.exe /Mount-Wim / WimFile:C:\Mount\boot.wim /Index:1 /MountDir:C:\Mount\BootWIM
- Add drivers:
DISM.exe /Image:C:\Mount\BootWIM /Add-Driver /Driver:C:\Mount\Drivers /recurse
- Commit change on WIM file and unmout it:
DISM.exe /Unmount-Wim /MountDir:C:\Mount\BootWIM /Commit
