We have previously posted about installing Windows 11 using DISM only. The same method can be used to create a Windows To Go portable USB drive. But if you do not like working with command line tools then there is a GUI based tool for working with WIM images called GImageX.
We can use GImageX for doing all things with WIM images – deploy WIM images to drives, capture WIM images from a Windows system, modify existing WIM images and extract files from the WIM images. If you want to know how to deploy any WIM image using the GImageX too, then you can follow these steps:
- Connect the target HDD or SSD on which you want to deploy the WIM image. Its partitions should be visible in Windows File Explorer.
- Download GImageX from https://www.autoitconsulting.com/site/software/gimagex/.
- Launch GImageX and select the Info tab. Select the WIM image file and click on the Get Info button. If there are multiple versions available inside the WIM file, then note down the index number of version you want to deploy.
- Select the Apply tab. Choose WIM file as the source, choose target partition as the destination and change index to the number we have found in the step 2 above. Click on the Apply button.
- In a few minutes the WIM image will be deployed to the selected partition. It displays progress and informs you when the deployment has been completed.
Unfortunately, we could not find any option to make a partition bootable in the GImageX window. For making the partition bootable, we have to use the methods that we described in the article about how to clean install Windows 11 on any HDD or SSD using DISM. Basically you have to assign a drive letter to the EFI partition, format it to FAT32 and then use the bcdboot command to make it bootable.