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Installing Windows 10X (emulator image) on real hardware

Here's some quick notes on installing Windows 10X on real hardware. For this example, we're assuming a system with no other critical disks installed, and a helpful host system being around to set up the initial image.

Prerequisites

Host

  • Windows 10 Manganese build (195xx).
  • Utility USB flash drive of ~32GB+.

Target

  • CPU with Hyper-V support for VAIL.
  • Graphics card with DCHU drivers available.
  • UEFI system firmware.firmware with the ability to disable Secure Boot.
  • Preferred: 4Kn boot drive. We'll provide steps a bit later for converting the image.

Host work

Fetch and mount the emulator image

Make sure you have a clean Flash.vhdx from the W10X emulator. Copy it someplace, and preferably keep another backup as well.

Mount it using PowerShell (as administrator):

Mount-VHD "X:\WCOS\Flash.vhdx"

Check if the emulator image is mounted correctly:

Get-StoragePool -FriendlyName OSPool

This should look like the following:

FriendlyName OperationalStatus HealthStatus IsPrimordial IsReadOnly     Size AllocatedSize
------------ ----------------- ------------ ------------ ----------     ---- -------------
OSPool       OK                Healthy      False        False      127.9 GB      21.81 GB

Gather UpdateApp and verify it works

Start diskpart so you can mount MainOS:

list volume
# select the volume called MainOS
select volume 42
# assuming M: is free
assign letter=m

exit

From the MainOS partition, go and hunt down the following files and drop them in a standalone folder (for example, X:\WCOS\Tools):

\Windows\Servicing

  • UpdateApp.exe
  • CbsApi.dll
  • CbsMsg.dll

\Windows\System32

  • CbsCore.dll
  • DrvServicing.dll
  • IUSpaces.dll
  • IUSpaces_vb.dll (copy and rename IUSpaces.dll)
  • UpdateAPI.dll
  • cimfs.dll
  • cmiadapter.dll
  • cmiaisupport.dll
  • cmintegrator.dll
  • dpx.dll
  • drvstore.dll
  • msdelta.dll
  • mspatcha.dll
  • mspatchc.dll
  • turbostack.dll
  • wcp.dll
  • wdscore.dll

Run cmd.exe as administrator, go to the tool directory, and try getting the installed packages on the image:

cd /d X:\WCOS\Tools
updateapp getinstalledpackages

The result should look a lot like the following:

UpdateApp - Update Application for Windows Mobile

[00:00:00] Loaded servicing stack from X:\wcos\tools with session name IUPackageInfoSession_EFIESP
[00:00:00] External storage staging directory is: (null)
[00:00:00] Closing session IUPackageInfoSession_EFIESP
[00:00:00] Loaded servicing stack from X:\wcos\tools with session name IUPackageInfoSession_MainOS
[00:00:00] External storage staging directory is: (null)
[00:00:01] Closing session IUPackageInfoSession_MainOS
164 packages:
        Microsoft-OneCore-HyperV-Guest-UpdateOS-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~10.0.19563.1000, UpdateOS
        Microsoft-OneCore-HyperV-Guest-UpdateOS-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.19563.1000, UpdateOS
        Microsoft-OneCore-ServicingStack-UpdateOS-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.19563.1000, updateos
        Microsoft-OneCore-ServicingStack-UpdateOS-UX-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.19563.1000, updateos
        Microsoft-OneCoreUpdateOS-Product-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~10.0.19563.1000, updateos
        Microsoft-OneCoreUpdateOS-Product-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.19563.1000, updateos
        Microsoft-Windows-OneCoreUpdateOS-ImageCustomization-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.19563.1000, updateos
        Microsoft-Composable-ModernPC-BootEnvironment-Core-CodeIntegrity-Sbcp-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.19563.1000, EFIESP
        Microsoft-OneCore-BcdBootoption-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.19563.1000, EFIESP
        
        [...]
        
getinstalledpackages completed successfully
command took 7 seconds

If it does, congratulations! You can move on to the next step.

Inject graphics and network drivers

For this example we'll show the Intel HD Graphics driver, but you might need to add more INFs depending on your hardware. If you can't find the right INFs, why are you even doing this?

Place extracted Intel drivers in a directory, so that you have e.g. X:\WCOS\DHCUDrivers\Graphics\iigd_dch.inf. Open iigd_dch.inf, and note down the values for 'Provider' and 'DriverVer'. For me, those were:

Provider=%Intel%
DriverVer=08/23/2019,26.20.100.7158

The provider name is an indirected variable here, so we go and find what %Intel% meant as well. A bit below in the INF, we find the following:

Intel         = "Intel Corporation"

Good! Now, invoke updateapp with the data we've just discovered to install the INF to the BSP partition in your WCOS image:

updateapp install "DriverPackage|X:\WCOS\DHCUDrivers\Graphics\iigd_dch.inf|Intel_Corporation-iigd_dch.inf~amd64~26.20.100.7158~bsp|0"

Note the recurrence of Intel_Corporation and 26.20.100.7518. The installation process will complain with an error code of c0880005 if you get the 'keyform' wrong.

After you've installed your favorite driver packages, we can prepare the utility flash drive.

Make an utility flash drive

Gather the following assets into a directory we'll label X:\WCOS\UtilityDrive\Boot:

  • From an ISO of Windows 10 19559 AMD64 (or higher - see UUPDump or similar for generating these):
    • boot\
    • EFI\
    • sources\boot.wim
    • bootmgr.efi
  • For later servicing, your WCOS\Tools folder. Use a hex editor to replace any mention of the Unicode string X:\Windows in UpdateAPI.dll and UpdateApp.exe with something like X:\Wbndows, or expect any servicing tasks to fail.
  • An x64 EFI shell. Rename EFI\boot\bootx64.efi to EFI\boot\winx64.efi, and name the shell as EFI\boot\bootx64.efi. You'll need the shell in order to ever boot regular Windows again (including PE).
  • A file called startup.nsh in the root:
    dmpstore -d SecureBootPlatformID
fs0:\efi\boot\winx64.efi
fs1:\efi\boot\winx64.efi
fs2:\efi\boot\winx64.efi
fs3:\efi\boot\winx64.efi
fs4:\efi\boot\winx64.efi
fs5:\efi\boot\winx64.efi
fs6:\efi\boot\winx64.efi
fs7:\efi\boot\winx64.efi
fs8:\efi\boot\winx64.efi
fs9:\efi\boot\winx64.efi
fsA:\efi\boot\winx64.efi
  • gdisk64.exe from GPT fdisk.
  • ddrelease64.exe.

Partitioning

  1. Connect your UFD.
  2. Open diskpart.
  3. list disk, select disk the right disk, or you'll lose all data on it and will have to do a long partition scan to have any hopes of retrieving your data, and clean + convert gpt.
  4. create partition primary size=5000, format fs=fat32 quick, assign letter=y to make a bootable FAT32 partition.
  5. create partition primary, format fs=exfat quick, assign letter=z to make an exFAT partition to house the VHDX.

Putting things in place

Place your boot drive directory on the drive you called Y:. Dismount-VHD "X:\WCOS\Flash.vhdx in your PowerShell to unmount the VHDX, and copy the VHDX to Z:. You should now have a tree structure similar to:

Y:\
    Boot\
    EFI\
    Sources\
    Tools\
    startup.nsh
    
Z:\
    Flash.vhdx

Unplug the UFD and boot the target from it.

Target work

Boot Windows PE

Copy the VHD (destructive!)

Rebuild the GPT (for 512-byte disks only)

Boot Windows PE, again

Boot W10X

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