Powershell V4.0 updates to the Dism module

2013-09-16

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Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 is RTM and that means PowerShell 4 is as well!

PowerShell 4.0 brings a whole bunch of new treats to the table, one of the most notable being Desired State Configuration which I will come back to in a later post, but there is also a bunch of other news, one of them being a few new cmdlets in the Dism module.

The following commandlets are new in the Dism module and worth noting are the three parameters -LogPath -LogLevel and -ScratchDirectory which is available for all cmdlets below.

-LogPath lets us specify where the logs should be written. The default directory is %WINDIR%LogsDismdism.log but I imagine that logging to a remote share like “ServerDismLogs$SerialnumberDism.log” would be highly convinient.

-LogLevel lets us specify a number from 1 to 4:

<td>
  Errors Only
</td>

<td>
  Errors and warnings
</td>

<td>
  Errors, Warnings and Information
</td>

<td>
  Errors, Warnings, Information and Debug
</td>

If the parameter is left out, default value is 3.

-ScratchDirectory is used to specify a temp directory that will be used for extracting files.

Expand-WindowsImage

Used to apply an image from a .wim-file directly from PowerShell, similar to using Dism.exe /apply-image.

The required parameters are -ApplyPath which specifies where the image should be applied, -ImagePath that specifies which image that should be applied and either -Index or -Name to specify which image index number or image name in the wim-file that should be used.

Export-WindowsImage

Exports a copy of a image to another image file.

Get-WindowsImageContent

This is the powershell version of Dism /List-Image, it will simply list all files and folders in the specified image. Worth noting is that doing this in PowerShell will return an array of strings.

New-WindowsImage

Used to capture an Image in PowerShell, similar to Dism /Capture-Image

Remove-WindowsImage

Removes an image from a specified image file.

Set-AppXProvisionedDataFile

Used to add custom data into a specified app package (.appx). An app package is used to provision Windows 8-style applications (also known as Metro-apps).

Split-WindowsImage

Used to split a wim-file into multiple readonly swm-files.

Great command to use when applying large images from USB onto UEFI-booted computers since UEFI requires boot from FAT32 and FAT32 only supports single files up to 4GB.