Is it possible to repair a windows image using DISM from WinPE

I have a Hyper-V VM that will not boot, bluescreening saying PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

I can boot into WinPE (recovery), but cannot boot in safe mode.

Is it possible to run DISM from WinPE, and do a restorehealth command on the installed Windows Image?

Solution 1:

It depends on what OS the VM is to some extent, but yes, you can. I would actually do this with a copy of the VM's hard drive mounted directly on another computer with full access to things like windows update, but WinPE should work too.

Rough instructions on how to do so are here at: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824869.aspx but you essentially use

Dism /Image:W:\ /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

where W:\ is your offline drive mounted. This should allow you to fix it from windows update If that doesn't work, you can use the /Source: flag to specify a source. Combined with

DISM /mount-Image /ImageFile:D:\sources\install.wim /index:1 /mountdir:C:\WIM\ /readonly

where D:\ is an install disc and C:\WIM is an empty directory

you should be able to use

Dism /Image:W:\ /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /Source:C:\WIM\windows