2. Get it rolling

If you want to know how to get started with WMI, you're in the right spot!

System requirements

I describe Windows Manual Installer as "an open Windows installer". But there's actually a bunch of other things you may want to know about it.

First, yes it is a Windows installer variant, but it doesn't work for every Windows version.

It works best when installing Windows 10 & Windows 11, but doesn't support versions older than Windows 8 (included).

This is mainly due to the method Windows 8 & older adopted to extract the Windows image. In fact, they don't use DISM (the tool used by WMI and by Windows 8.1 onwards) at all, they have their own way of extracting the Windows image onto the disk, but I haven't found any way of knowing anything of it and making WMI use it.

But I'm just gonna drop the well-known support table below and let it talk instead.

Version	Supported (Y/N)	Reason
Windows 11	Y	Plus, it's now natively supported by WMI (no separate UEFI version is needed)!
Windows 10	Y	BIOS or UEFI, both are supported by the same version of WMI!
Windows 8.1	Kind of*	The TUI will not be displayed correctly, but you can still manage to install Windows.
<<Windows 8	N	There's no suitable method to extract the Windows image an install it on a disk.

*: By "kind of" I mean the following: yes, you'll be able to successfully install Windows 8.1 using WMI, but the entire TUI (terminal user interface) will be poorly displayed. More specifically, special characters that are displayed by WMI to show a basic TUI layout are not supported by any means by Windows 8.1. You'll just see a bunch of crap (èòçùàç§) being displayed instead of those characters. Luckily, I've built a way for WMI to adapt to any Window layout and size, so you'll be able to see what's going on on the screen for the majority of the setup process.

Secondly, you need:

• A Windows ISO file from which to make the bootable USB needed to install Windows.

• A USB drive (any size really, WMI executable + needed DLLs + core files roughly take around 3MBs of disk space.)

• A destination disk (this could be a USB device, a SATA drive, pretty much every drive is supported as long as it is large enough (32GB+) and fast enough (USB 2.0 drives are usually very slow and can't handle a Windows installation). Common USB 3.0+ devices are a suitable option, even though the setup process might take a little longer than expected.)

And that's pretty much it!

Getting started

I'll give you a detailed explanation on how you can get WMI to work. You'll realize that it's really simple, and you'll quickly get used to it.

To know more about certain steps, you can jump to the section that really goes into details for that specific step.

Build WMI

To obtain an usable copy of WMI, you can either choose to download the zip file (x64) from the Release Page, or you can build it from source.

Build from source

If you want to build WMI from source, you first have to download the source code.

Once you've downloaded it, open a command prompt window inside of the root folder.

You can build WMI by running the following command:

$ make install

A new install/ folder will appear.

Grab an empty USB device and copy the content of the install/ folder inside of it.

Once you made sure that the following files:

• wmi.exe //WMI executable

• libgcc_s_seh-1.dll

• libstdc++-6.dll

• libwinpthread-1.dll //Some libraries

• WMIFILES/ //Contains some files

  • COPYING //Copyright information

  • fullscr.vbs

  • MAS_AIO.cmd //MAS executable

  • wpu.bat //WMI Post-Install Utility executable

are in the root of your USB drive, you can jump to the next step.

Run WMI

Once you're all set to install Windows with WMI, you can proceed with the following steps:

• Insert the target disk into the target computer.

• Make a bootable Windows installation USB (you need a Windows ISO file of the version you want to install and a tool you can flash it to a USB drive with, such as Rufus).

• Insert the Windows installation USB you just created into the target computer.

• Boot it up choosing as the boot source the Windows installation USB.

• Once the Windows Installer has booted up, press Shift + F10 to bring up a command prompt window:

  

• When you see the CMD window on your screen, type the full path to the wmi.exe executable. It should be located at the letter your WMI USB is assigned to:  

  

  If you have no idea about what letter is assigned to your USB drive, you can run the

  below command:

  > for %a in (A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z) do (if exists %a:\wmi.exe (%a:\wmi.exe))

  It will scan through every letter of the alphabet till it finds one that contains the wmi.exe executable. When found, starts it.

  NOTE: Make sure the command prompt window you're running WMI from is NOT fullscreen. If it's fullscreen, the TUI will break (I'm already working on a fix).

From now on, you just need to follow the instructions that are given by WMI on your screen. WMI will guide you through every phase of the setup process.