How to recreate the Windows recovery partition.

Matthew Wai said:

Presumably, an unknown problem had been fixed via Windows PE yesterday.

I suspect that "unknow problem" was dirty BCD store. Nothing allowed to enable WinRE in my running system after OS upgrade, until I rebuilt and cleaned BCD in Admin CMD:

Code:

bcdedit /V /enum all
rem see dublicates and wrong & obsolete BCD records, including WinRE related

bcdboot c:\windows
bcdboot /bcdclean full
rem rebuild BCD, remove dublicates and wrong records of non-existing GUIDs

Also, run Everything Search as admin to quickly find Reagentc.xml files saved in your system, including in protected and hidden folders, and delete them in your recovery partition or folder.

Than follow the 2nd answer in the Superuser forum topic ReAgentc: Unable to update WinRE boot configuration data to rebuild WinRE partition, and add new WinRE boot record to Windows BCD store and Bootloader Advanced Settings with reagentc /enable. No need to use WinPE to rebuild WinRE, same is true for Windows 11+.

WinRE partition is preferred next to Windows partition, so consider moving recovery partition if needed with Windows or 3rd party disk tools. If Windows was in-place upgraded, its old recovery partition remained intact, while new WinRE.wim was saved in C:\Recovery\WindowsRE or on adjacent partition. Enable it or rebuild old recovery partition as above, possibly extending it to fit new WinRE.wim + 300 MB free for recovery updates.