Capturing and Deploying a System Image In Windows 7 Part 5: Deploying the System Image

Now that we have captured our system image, we can deploy it onto our destination computer.
You need to put the Windows PE disc in the computer and restart. If you saved the image to a USB flash drive you will also need to insert that into the computer, if you have saved the image onto the network ensure that your destination computer has a network connection.

When the computer boots you will see the same command prompt you saw to capture the image. If you have a brand new unformatted disk you can skip this step You can choose to format your hard disk by removing it from the computer, putting it in an external hard disk reader and format it using the disk management utility on another windows 7 computer. You can find a guide on how to do that here.
You can also do this using the Windows PE command prompt.
You need to type:

diskpart 
select disk 0 
clean 
create partition primary size=200 
select partition 1 
format fs=ntfs label="system" 
assign letter=c 
active 
create partition primary 
select partition 2
format fs=ntfs label="Windows" 
assign letter=f
exit

Each of these commands needs to be typed on a seperate line, and every time you type a command you will receive an acknowledgment message. For example when you type "select disk 0" you should see "disk 0 is now the selected disk" etc.

Once your disk is formatted you need to copy the image from where you have stored it onto the local drive.
If you are using a USB flash drive you need to type (this is assuming your USB flash drive is assigned the letter f, you need to replace f with the letter of your USB flash drive. If you are not sure which letter the flash drive is using type dir followed by drive letters until you find the one with the image on it) :

copy e:\win7.wim f:

If your image is stored on the network you need to type:

net use y: \\<server>\<share>
copy y:\win7.wim f:

You then need to apply the image to the hard drive, using the imagex tool included in the Windows PE image:

d:\imagex.exe /apply e:\win7.wim 1 f:

You then need to use BCDboot to initialize the boot configuration data store and copy boot environment files to the system partition of the hard drive.

f:\windows\system32\bcdboot f:\windows

And that's the image deployed. Now you just need to do that for any other destination computers that you have. If you are doing this as a test, to make sure it has worked you can reboot the computer. It should boot into the Windows setup. You shouldn't need to provide any additional information because the image you have contains the install, so it should be a simple case of windows just needing to install the files!