I'm getting ready to upgrade my wife's PC to Win 11 Pro. I performed a MBR2GPT on the C: drive and it completed successfully. However, when I went into Disk Management to make sure the properties of the C: drive were GPT I noticed I only have 2 partitions, the 1st is the Windows OS and the 2nd is 'Healthy (EFI System Partition)'.
Shouldn't there be another partition for recovery? If so, how do I get it?
Hi, if you were to use a 3rd party partition manager you'd hopefully find you have at least 3 (There's one Disk Management doesn't show).
I would think what you have now rather depends on whether there was a Recovery partition present previously.
How did you do the conversion?
Convert MBR Disk to GPT Disk in Windows 10
Convert Windows 10 from Legacy BIOS to UEFI without Data Loss
(Noted- you have 21H1 specified as your build - under your avatar).
I assume you've checked the PC meets the hardware requirements- or are you aiming to work around those?
You should be able to recreate a Recovery partition if you do an in-place upgrade repair install which keeps all progs and data like any 'upgrade'. Tutorial available.
I believe I went to Windows Repair and then to an offline command prompt where I issued the MBR2GPT command.
That sounds ok. mbr2gpt doesn't create an msr partition in my experience. Separate recovery partition is not required.
The original mbr setup would usually have winre.wim in a hidden recovery folder on the os partition. It is probably still there.
If you go to folder options ( or whatever it is called now) and show hidden and protected files, you should be able to see the recovery folder.
You can check if the recovery sequence ( which points at winre.wim ) is still valid
at admin cmd type:
reagentc /info
Entered the command and got this:
Windows RE status: Disabled
Windows RE location:
Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: 86806547-7e9a-11e9-ac72-ff692d089b75
Recovery image location:
Recovery image index: 0
Custom image location:
Custom image index: 0
Is this right?
Should I do a /enable ?
I tried a /enable and got 'Unable to update Boot Configuration data'.
Now what?
Last edited by rzn6jw; 25 Oct 2023 at 16:28.
That can happen after conversion.
put winre.wim and the original reagent.xml file in windows\system32\recovery and you can set it again.
For future reference, the simplest way to avoid that is to disable first. Then do the conversion to gpt. Then enable.
OK. I wish they would make a line item regarding the disable in the tutorial. Anyway, where do I find the winre.wim and reagent.xml files. A search didn't come up with anything.
OK, going to quit this thread as I have a more pressing issue and will create a new thread.
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