Can't boot into Macrium Recovery RE but PE works OK

Thanks!

kelper said:

I'm on v8.1.7784. I have just removed the boot entry and re-added it. And I forced a WIM rebuild
Didn't work..

I have licensed copies of Reflect Home v8 on four of my machines, all 64-bit, some are Win11, one is Win10. But I have more machines than licences, so the rest have Reflect Free, 32 or 64 bit as appropriate. Without exception all of them have a working WinRE boot menu.

I have seen others report problems making Reflect RE rescue media, though not seen it myself. As far as I can tell Macrium are as puzzled by this as we are. It appears that the problem is not in Macrium itself, rather it's in the WinRE.wim that it uses as the base on which to build the rescue media. WinRE.wim is a part of Windows and was supplied by Microsoft, so there may not be much Macrium can do to correct this.

I would try replacing your WinRE.wim with a known good copy from a Microsoft install ISO. If the recovery environment is enabled then WinRE.wim is in the recovery partition where you cannot easily get to it. Disable the recovery environment and it will be moved back to C:\Windows\System32\Recovery for safe keeping.

Enable or Disable Windows Recovery Environment in Windows 10

You can extract a fresh copy of WinRE.wim from the install.esd or install.wim in the Sources folder of your install ISO or USB by opening it with 7-Zip File Manager, you should probably get the ReAgent.xml file too. Place these in your C:\Windows\System32\Recovery, then try rebuilding your Reflect RE boot menu. There is no need to re-enable the recovery environment, the Reflect rescue media builder will find WinRE.wim wherever it is. In fact it searches every partition of your machine and uses the latest version of WinRE.wim that it can find.

@Bree, I have a registered MR 8 but never created a MR rescue under WinRE. I have a custom boot able WinPE with lots of tools, including MR
If the size of MR and the drivers that are around 200MB and the Recovery partition is normally quite full, where is MR rescue created?
I think it is under C:\Windows\System32\Recovery.
Could you please clarify where is MR rescue created?

I see that under C:\boot I have the files to create the Win PE rescue drive.

You probably know this, but I've never really looked before:

from
Creating rescue media - KnowledgeBase v7.2 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase - KnowledgeBase v7.2 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

SIW2 said:

%systemdrive%\boot\macrium\WinREFiles\media\sources\boot.wim

It is a bcd winpe entry pointing at the above. It is not magic.

That makes sense to me. Thanks Simon

Megahertz said:

@Bree, I have a registered MR 8 but never created a MR rescue under WinRE. I have a custom boot able WinPE with lots of tools, including MR

....Could you please clarify where is MR rescue created?

The Rescue Media Builder does all its work in the 'Staging Area', that's C:\boot\macrium

Details here:
Rescue Media Builder - Knowledgebase 8.0 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

On my 32-bit Windows 10 22H2 ISO there are six copies of winre.wim. They are all identical at 342,272,743 bytes.

I used 7zip to extract install.esd to a USB HDD. The total size was about 67GB as it contains files for different versions of Windows (I think)

Then I copied one winre.wim to add to my C:\Windows\System32\Recovery.

I'll advise later if my ASUS can now boot into RE from the Windows boot manager.