I just noticed this thread today, and it reminded me of some recent experiences when changing from a SATA to M.2 SSD using Macrium Reflect Free to back up and restore using an image. The original SATA SSD had a weird partition order, with an unused recovery partition first, and the active recovery partition last.
When restoring, I dragged the partitions around, eliminating the unused recovery partition and putting the partitions into Microsoft's
recommended order (System, MSR, Windows, Recovery).
I was initially unable to reboot the new configuration, and after unsuccessfully trying a few things (fix boot problems in Macrium etc.), I finally got it fixed by configuring my BIOS to UEFI mode. It was set to CSM before, but used the UEFI option within CSM. That didn't work. It had to be forced to UEFI.
All was well after that, except the actual recovery partition, according to reagentc, was the Windows partition and not the separate partition designated and allocated for that purpose. I finally fixed that by using diskpart to temporarily assign an R: drive letter to the designated separate recovery partition, finding the winre.wim and ReAgent.xml on a windows ISO I had, and copying them to the proper directory on the R: drive. Then I used the /setreimage option to reagentc to specify the location on the R: drive for the Windows RE image. Then I unassigned the R: drive letter to prevent accidental access to the recovery partition.
This all worked fine, although it took a long time to figure out. One post I read earlier on tenforums talked about extracting winre.wim and ReAgent.xml from a numbered subdirectory of the install.esd archive in the \sources directory of the ISO. That post said it didn't matter which of the directories 1 through 7 you used to get those files. Unfortunately, I can't find that post now.
After reading
this post though, I got paranoid, thinking I might have extracted the Windows RE image for the wrong Windows version. I used the "1" subdirectory of the install.esd archive, although I use Windows 10 Pro. So as a test, I tried extracting to my data hard drive the winre.wim and ReAgent.xml from the subdirectories 1, 4, and 6 (Windows Home, Education and Pro) of the install.esd archive, giving them different names. Using the Windows fc.exe (file compare) utility, I determined that for these 3 Windows versions at least, all of the winre.wim and ReAgent.xml were binary identical.
So it was a relief knowing I didn't have to do yet more work to get it all right.
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I
found the post in question (too late to edit my original post).