1. Introduction

Here you can find general information about Windows Manual Installer.

Overview

Windows Manual Installer is a C++ program that has the same functionality of the default Windows Installer (the one that gets bundled with every Windows ISO file distributed by Microsoft) while being faster, lighter and open-source.

It was originally developed in Batch. The fact it was a script and not an actual program actually made it even lighter and easier to code and maintain, but as you can imagine it was also much less safe.

In fact, there were lots of ways it could be easily poked, and instead of releasing new bugfix versions every two days I thought it might have been a much more viable idea to rewrite it from scratch, this time using C++.

This would have allowed me to not only have multiple ways of making the code safer & stronger, but at the same time I would have had a much faster program than the one I had before.

Because yeah, Batchfile is a huge pain in the a55 to deal with. Not only it is super slow, but bear in mind that WMI is meant to be run in a Windows PE environment, where normally resources are stripped down to the bare minimum, we've got no support for any of the advanced features that are instead available on a standard Windows system, and the bottleneck was far too noticeable when using low-speed USB devices to launch WMI (the Batch version).

Features

WMI offers a bunch of features you can play with. First of all, in case you're installing Windows 11, you can override those system requirements that were imposed by Microsoft. More than system requirements, those just seem a way to make Windows run on the best PCs available to the human species only. Flip off!

Secondly, WMI allows you to install Windows to a USB drive, provided that it is fast and large enough to run Windows. But if you're wanting to install Windows to a Western Digital-like 8204357TB drive, you shouldn't run into too much trouble.

And thirdly, WMI includes a very fast way you can make use of to recover (or at least save), format and clean a disk that has been "damaged" by a risky operation that didn't end so well: it's WMI Rollback, and it's now more powerful than ever before! It's used by WMI to restore a disk after a failed Windows installation (or after a failure during Stage 0). Don't worry, it's very reliable and is very likely not to fail like its previous versions did.

And you can add even more to WMI, these are just the building blocks to successfully install Windows in a custom way. It's up to you how you want it to work!

Or alternatively, you can post a suggestion on features you want to be added, you can open a pull request or also open an issue to keep me informed of any issue you can be experiencing with WMI.

Purpose

The goal of WMI is to deliver an extraordinary (out-of-ordinary) way to install Windows, that can replace the default one at an almost 1:1 ratio from the ease-of-use and efficiency point of view.

WMI provides a basic installer you can install Windows with, but you can customize it the way you want to. For example, if you need to perform tons of unattended Windows installations at a time, you can add a couple of lines of code to a default WMI build to make it perform the actions you need the way you need them and call it a day.

This is the key concept around which WMI is built: you can take it as a base from which you can keep adding the features you want. And it even works out of the box!