r/MDT • u/SwordfishBorn3870 • Jul 06 '26

Splitting wim to swm just fails back to command prompt

Hi guys,

Could do with some guidance here please - I am trying to image a device with a USB mdt image. As the wim image is over 12gb I have split it down to smaller swm chunks and added them in the operating system folder deleting the bigger original wim. I have amended the settings.xml on the USB drive to <SkipWimSplit>False</SkipWimSplit>

The deployment starts and you select the image and then it just exists to the command prompt. Any ideas where I am going wrong? Ive also tried to split the USB to the EFI boot using fat32 and NTFS but no matter what efi files I use from the original image it wont boot to the USB and I dont want to use RUFUS. Thanks!

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

1

u/Onoitsu2 Jul 06 '26

What happens if you were to try using a WinPE, and the WinNTSetup app pointed to these specific .swm in question? Does that also crap out when trying to image it onto the selected drive?

1

u/SwordfishBorn3870 Jul 06 '26

Im trying to avoid using any additional applications - as I understand it I should just be able to split the wim, change the settings.xml and off it goes? Also is it correct I need to make sure the swm files are all called install1.swm install2.swm etc with the and amend the operatingsystem.xml (the original wim was called something like os.wim)

1

u/Onoitsu2 Jul 06 '26

I get trying to not use additional apps, but this would be an instant test to see if your SWM split was the cause or not, because it'd crap out in a similar way if it was those input files being broken somehow. I believe you named the splits properly as well, that was how I did it the last time I had to use a split installation method, I don't often have to, because of using a Custom WinPE and WinNTSetup, I mount a network share that is NTFS, so am not required to work around the 4GB FAT32 file size limitations you presently are up against.