WSIM couldn’t find wimgapi.dll

I decided to restart all my 70-646 practice from scratch again, and this error occurred during the catalog processing of the install.wim file by WSIM. For those who don’t remember, WSIM (comes with WAIK) is used to create the autounattended answer file for custom deployment. After googling, I found that the missing dll file should be placed in the system folder. Sometimes, WAIK doesn’t install the file to the system folder but instead to the Program Files folder, and, on top of that, it doesn’t update the system path to point to the new location. All one has to do to remedy the situation is to find the file or download it, and place it into the system folder.

wimgapi.dll

WSIM Error in Windows 2008 SP1 for Autoattended File Creation

Part of the MCITP course requires the learning of Windows Deployment Services (WDS), and I decided to give this a shot before my training class starts again. My setup is a s follows:

My first VM is a domain controller (DC1) with all the required services installed for WDS to work properly. What are those requirements? Let’s see these requirements and their command line installation parameters!

1. DNS (servermanagercmd -install DNS)

2. AD (run dcpromo.exe)

3. DHCP (servermanagercmd -install DHCP)

4. WDS (servermanagercmd -install WDS)

After all of this is done and you have configured your WDS server, next is the creation of an autounattended file to cut down on the manual interaction during a Windows OS install. Before you proceed in this file creation, the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) is needed. The version that I am using is from way back in 2007. After starting Windows System Image Manager (WSIM), I selected the install.wim file from the root of my C: drive after I copied it from the DVD. As WSIM was processing the file, I received this error message with an attached log file:

“The specified location contains a Windows image that is not compatible with the current version of Windows.”

All of this made no sense as I worked with the exact version of the Windows 2008 file. I googled the error and found that the WAIK version I had was old and doesn’t support Windows 2008, but there is a new version. I downloaded and installed this new version of WAIK. WSIM started and finished processing the image file with no errors, and I was able to successfully produce the autounattended file for srevr 2008 deployment.

Links for WAIK:

New Version

Old Version