When you install Windows Server 2012 Core and want to “transform” the installation into gui (yes, it’s possible) , you will need to know the source path, since during the CORE only installation the installation source files are not kept. That’s why the installation of Windows Server 2012 as a core only takes much less space.
How to determine the index number for a server with GUI image? It’s simple, but we will need a help of Powershell on that, because we need to find out which index number does apply for our installation. As you know, Windows Server 2012 can be installed as Datacenter (core or GUI) or Standard (core or GUI), from the same ISO image. So we do have 4 possibilities (four different paths to the installation media).
First, what is WIM file for?
.wim file is simply a container that contains one or more images. These base images contained in the default install.wim file pulled out of the Sources directory on the Windows Server 2012 media.
Windows Server 2012 core Install GUI
This PowerShell command helps to find the path
<em>Get-WindowsImage -ImagePath <path to wim>\install.wim</em>
The output looks like this:
Then the actual command to convert CORE to GUI would look like this:
Install-WindowsFeature Server-GUI-Mgmt-Infra,Server-GUI-Shell –Restart –Source wim:<path>:<index>
So in my case as I mounted the ISO file to as my D: drive, the command would look like this:
Install-WindowsFeature Server-GUI-Mgmt-Infra,Server-GUI-Shell –Restart –Source wim:d:\sources\install.wim:2
