The real test of a presentation is when you come back 6 months later to repeat the steps.  Now you no longer remember much because you don’t often use a particular skill.  In this case it’s creating a bootable VHD image, which was part of my presentations for Beta, Beta Everywhere: http://nerdnotes.net/blog/PermaLink,guid,1d2dd740-8f6c-4417-80fe-604eb5665bb7.aspx. 

The first thing I forgot to note but quickly realized is that Windows Server 2008 can’t be a bootable image.  Fortunately Windows Server 2008 R2 can be… so no worries, just need to burn the correct DVD.

The second item was more challenging and it involved DISM.  The easy way to get the information to use to create  your image is to use the index value of the image file from the DVD.  To get this you leverage DISM.  All good, until it came to an example of the command line you actually need.  I don’t think I captured it.  So here it is for future reference:

C:\Windows\system32>dism /Get-WimInfo /WimFile:e:\sources\install.wim

The output from that line will list the index and name of each image on the DVD.  And now in 6 or 12 or 24 months when I need it again, I’ll have it at my fingertips.