How to shrink/reduce size of boot.wim?

[pollos7]

We are using WDS to deploy XP images. It's all working file with the use of sysprep.inf / unattended.xml and prestaging (so a fully automated installation of XP). However, the image used by PXE booting, the standard boot.wim from the Windows Server 2008 DVD is about 378 MB. It takes about 70 seconds to load, which is very long. I have searched several forums, but did not find an appropriate answer how to shrink this file. Does anyone know which files, components etc. can be stripped from the .wim boot image so loading does not take longer than 30 seconds? The only components I need are, of course, the selection of the boot images and the disk options. Thanks very much in advance.

Edited February 12, 2008 by pollos7

[jezza333]

What you can do is grab the boot.wim file [it's roughly 110MB] from the WAIK [freely downloadable] or a Vista DVD. Then apply the wim file contents to a directory and re-capture it using the following method:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=1970#entry12329

What you can do [because it's copied across the network] is use maximum compression [/compress maximum] which should slim it down a few MB.

I hope that helps

Edited April 2, 2008 by jezza333