Determine Win7 version on install DVD

I recently faced the question on how to determine the version of an given blank Windows 7 DVD.

After some web search and I had tried several ways here’s how you do this.

On my web search I discovered 3 ways to determine if the given DVD is an install media of an 32- or 64-bit system.

The first way is to take a look at the autorun.inf at the root of the DVD. Here you will find a section named [Autorun] and the whole file looks like this:

[Autorun]
open=setup.exe
icon=setup.exe,0

This is how it will look for 32-bit systems. 64-bit Autorun.inf contains the following lines:

[AutoRun.Amd64]
open=setup.exe
icon=setup.exe,0

[AutoRun]
open=sources\sperr32.exe x64
icon=sources\sperr32.exe,0

 

The second way is to check the file header of the actionqueue.dll within the sources directory.

The file header can be dumped with

dumpbin.exe /headers actionqueue.dll

dumpbin is a tool of the Windows SDK and is also shipped with Visual Studio (usually located at %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin\). Don’t forget to run vcvars32.bat to set up the environment before executing dumpbin.exe.

This prints out the following details:

Microsoft (R) COFF/PE Dumper Version 10.00.30319.01
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.


Dump of file actionqueue.dll

PE signature found

File Type: DLL

FILE HEADER VALUES
             14C machine (x86)
               4 number of sections
        4A5BDAEF time date stamp Tue Jul 14 03:10:07 2009
               0 file pointer to symbol table
               0 number of symbols
              E0 size of optional header
            2102 characteristics
                   Executable
                   32 bit word machine
                   DLL
...

Where file header @ 14C describes the target system. In this case this is x86 for 32-bit. In the case of 64-bit you will find the value x64 at the same position.

 

If you have already an installed Windows 7 System there is a third way. Just open up a console with admin rights and type

dism /Get-WimInfo /WimFile:D:\sources\boot.wim

which get’s the information from the windows boot image file and brings up the following information:

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 6.1.7600.16385

Details for image : D:\sources\boot.wim

Index : 1
Name : Microsoft Windows PE (x86)
Description : Microsoft Windows PE (x86)
Size : 806,390,831 bytes

Index : 2
Name : Microsoft Windows Setup (x86)
Description : Microsoft Windows Setup (x86)
Size : 881,382,947 bytes

The operation completed successfully.

 

Have fun.

All this could also be found @ superuser.com.