Edit Gaming laptop Recovery USB drive?

[Tex Williams]

Hello,

We have an older MSI gaming laptop, W10H, it came with a USB drive that resets everything to factory including recovery partitions.
When its ran there's no control other than a couple of "yes" to verify recovery prompts and an options of OS disk only or entire pc (2 disks) recovery.
Is it possible to edit the windows it installs? Specifically we (kid and I) are trying to remove OEM bloatware and trim various windows components out, while retaining a few key things that come with this recovery drive. Make this older laptop as fast as possible for gaming and privacy.
Included picture of the recovery USB sticks first DIR... Thank you for any help. Using Home version of NTLite.

 

[garlin]

Depending on the Recovery type, there may be an install.wim under \sources. If none exists, then all it does is run Windows Recovery to perform a System Reset. In that case, it's not a clean install image but a tool to force an existing Windows image back to a "default" state.

I would also remove the Unattend.xml, and check out if there's commands inside to reinstall the various OEM software apps.

In general, it's best to download a normal clean W10 ISO from MS and customize it. Then pick through the Recovery USB for any dedicated drivers or tools that you can't find a later version from MSI's website.

As you have a licensed NTLite, I would recommend looking into this preset for Gaming:
GamerOS Windows 10 & 11 DIY Preset

 

[Clanger]

Depending on the Recovery type, there may be an install.wim under \sources.

Which is where all the oem pre installed apps/programs will be.
And it will be horrendously out of date too.

In general, it's best to download a normal clean W10 ISO from MS and customize it. Then pick through the Recovery USB for any dedicated drivers or tools that you can't find a later version from MSI's website.

Yes, best way for a clean "re" install.

If Tex Williams cant get the original iso image from MS then he should see this thread to see his options to get the correct iso/build/edition as the machine came with from the factory.

 

[Clanger]

garlin we got an old thread around here somewhere about retaining oem info from oem images, can you point tex to it if you can please

 

[garlin]

Looking at the USB folder, MSI's got an unique layout and I can't really say how they're doing it. I imagine they're using Unattend.xml to run a custom launcher and wrappers for what is essentially a DISM /Apply-Image.

 

[Tex Williams]

Found a boot.wim in sources and some very large files in another. and also that xml didnt have anything I recognize, but Im no where near the level of knowledge yall are. Going to try and peak into the boot.wim

 

[Tex Williams]

used 7zip for boot.wim and also tried opening with ntlite, will this affect me being able to edit it?

 

[Clanger]

Put ntlite on that laptop, build a new preset with all the oem info, contact name, pc name etc only, no components yet, ntlite to back up drivers, get new clean ms matching iso, import preset and build from that. building from the recovery imge is looking to be a mojor pain for tex, fresh matching iso and off you go, much easier.

 

[garlin]

You don't need to touch boot.wim. However you have a split WIM for the install image, which makes it very likely this originated from a backup capture and not a clean ISO.

Load install.swm as your image file, and see if NTLite asks you to correctly re-assemble the SWM file segments into a single WIM file. After that, you should be able to see if there's more than one Windows edition present or not.

When the image is loaded, you can Right menu -> Explore mount directory and check if the image contains a backup of personal files or apps, which would account for the size of the SWM files. A clean image would not have any personal data inside it.

 

[Hellbovine]

...it came with a USB drive that resets everything to factory...

There's no need to keep any Windows DVD/flash drive that has Windows on it, because it's outdated and Microsoft releases the latest versions for free. The only thing you'll lose is the preinstalled OEM apps, but that software can be downloaded from their respective websites too.

- This guide (link1) explains the download and preparation of an image for editing and/or install.
- This guide (link2) explains how to cleanly install Windows.
- This guide (link3) explains some options for how to customize your image.

Consumers can choose between buying a computer that comes with a license (Dell, HP, etcetera), or building their own machine and purchasing a license. In both cases, the first time the computer is online and communicates with Microsoft it will attempt to automatically activate. If successful, Microsoft ties the key to the hardware ID of the motherboard and stores it on their server. Future installs will only activate if the ID matches.