Creating a Windows 10 Insider Preview ISO and Hyper-V VM

For those with access to Windows 10 Insider Preview builds, one common complaint is that there’s no official option for ISOs or VMs. However, we can still create our own relatively quickly.

Required tools:

• Windows 10 machine that has the build you wish to make a VM of.
• ESD-Decrypter (https://github.com/gus33000/ESD-Decrypter/releases)
• Convert-WindowsImage.ps1 (https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Convert-WindowsImageps1-0fe23a8f)

Steps:

1. Open up ESDToolKit_gui.bat (from ESD-Decrypter) and click next.

2. Pick the default WIM option. Feel free to use whatever naming style you prefer.

3. Use the default crypto keys.

4. Pick any path where you want to save the ISO. I'll put it in my 'Documents' folder.

5. On the next page, use ‘C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Install.esd’ as your ESD file.

6. Click next through the next three pages (the default options are fine).

7. At this point, you’ll have to wait 10-30 minutes for the ISO to be created.

8. After the conversion is done, you’ll find a new ISO in the folder you set.

9. We could use this to install a VM manually, but Convert-WindowsImage.ps1 can automatically create a bootable .VHDX for us. First, open PowerShell as an administrator.

10. Then import the Convert-WindowsImage.ps1 script and run 'Convert-WindowsImage -SourcePath <ISO name here>'.

11. After a couple of minutes, you'll find a new .vhdx file beside your ISO. We can now use this with Hyper-V.