Install "windows 8" version of DISM on Windows 7

Question

Is there a simple way of installing the Windows 8 version of Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool on Windows 7?

Windows 7 does have a version of DISM installed, but with much less functionality, in particular it lacks the following commands

dism /Delete-Image
dism /Split-Image
dism /Export-Image

(failed) try: I tried a naive way (below) of copy-paste. It doesn't work. When I call the windows 8 binary, it fails with a message box "missing api-ms-win-downlevel-kernel32-l1-1-0.dll" (is that a real DLL, by the way?

• Copy the binaries from windows 8 %SYSTEM% and %SYSTEM%\Dism
• Paste them to win7 %SYSTEM% and %SYSTEM%\Dism
• Register each dll with an elevated regsvr32.exe. Some succeed, some fail

Answer 1

Per default a Windows 7 installation comes with DISM 6.1.7600.16385.

What you can do here is to upgrade it to DISM 6.3.9600.17029 which will support:

dism /Delete-Image
dism /Split-Image
dism /Export-Image

All you need to do is:

1. Download and install the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) for Windows 8.1 Update from here or the direct download link.
   
2. When asked what features to install, select only the Deployment Tools (54 MB).

However after that the DISM 6.1.7600.16385 is still presence on your Windows 7 OS.

To use DISM 6.3.9600.17029 you NEED to run that directly from:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Deployment Tools\x86\DISM.
Otherwise you will still have the older DISM version as explained here.