I want to mount a WIM image as a new drive letter on Windows 10.
As follows from Microsoft documentation for DISM Image Management Command-Line Options, DISM can only mount a WIM image to an existing directory. Powershell Mount-DiskImage can only do what I want with VHD or ISO images (no mention of WIM in the docs).
The question: What is a practical way of having my .wim-file content attached to a drive letter (say, z:) that is not in use for anything else?
The main reason I want to do this is convenience of browsing the content. I made a WIM image to backup what used to be z:, now I need to access it, preferably as z:. Also, I noticed that opening WIM image using 7zip is much faster than mounting it to an existing file system. So I hope treating WIM as a separate logical drive will avoid this costly overhead.
I would appreciate the answer to my question, as well as any comments that correct any misunderdestanding of mine (such as whether WIM is a really bad choice for a backup).
Update 1. (responding to Ramhound's comment) I tried
dism /Mount-Wim /WimFile:c:\foo.wim /Index:1 /MountDir:z:The error message is:
The user attempted to mount to a directory that does not exist. This is not supported.1 Answer
There is an old trick that dates back to DOS epoch, when The Windows had not existed yet, but still supported:
SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]e.g.
C:\> Dism /mount-Image /ImageFile:c:\foo.wim /index:1 /mountdir:C:\mnt\wim1 /readonly /optimize
C:\> subst Z: c:\mnt\wim1This operation is not privileged, and, contrast to "normal" mounts, this substitution exists only within your current windows session, hence invisible to other users and discarded on logoff.
