Messed up WindowsRE after various OS installations in a partition

SoFine409 said:

OK lets try this another was. There is likely an OS partition and its probably intact. So go to this thread:
Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk
and download and create a bootable PE Rescue disk. This is handy to have because it has lots of good tools to help with these kinds of problems.

After you create it you can boot from it and use the file explorer to confirm that you still have the OS Partition and your data is intact. If so then run the Macrium Reflect Free Version on the desktop. In that you will find a menu selection that will repair all of the boot files. That it what I recently used to fix my PC. You'll have to select the System Partition, that's not hard because its named System Partition and then I think you also need to tell it where the OS is located. Tell it to repair everything since at this point you have nothing to loose. It should give you a clean set of boot files. If this works and you can boot to the system to Win10 and then I can show you how to get the Recovery information back in order using some different commands. I used them to that I used to fix mine. Post back and let me know if this works or you have any questions.

Do you have your data backuped so if you need to do a clean install you can? If not you could probably use the Macrium program on the PE recovery drive to back up your data to another drive or location, that is if the disk and partitions are still readable and at this point I think that it is.

Just in case: my Windows 10 operating system is working fine. The only problem is its "Recovery mode" which is currently inaccessible and doesn't even appear in the BCD list, which makes me think that both 'additional' partitions are only a waste of memory, except that one of them still lets me boot into the operating system properly.

There are two different partitions that we are talking about here, and I think they are getting confused. Seeing a screenshot of disk management would help:
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...creenshot.html

There is a System Reserved partition. On UEFI computers this is called the EFI System partition. This is the partition the computer boots from. In disk management, look inside the parenthesis (). One partition should have the word System inside the parenthesis. This is the partition that the computer boots from and must be present. Now on legacy BIOS computers the system partition the computer boots from can be part of the big partition that has the OS on it, it can part of the recovery partition, or it can be it's own partition. On a UEFI computer, this partition is always the EFI System partition and must be FAT32.

The other partition we are talking about is the System Recovery partition. In Windows 10, the recovery partition is completely option and is not required for Windows 10 to work. You can delete the recovery partition. All the standard recovery partition created by Windows 10 does is provide the recovery menu. You can also get to the recovery menu by booting from a Windows 10 installation USB flash drive or DVD. There are 2 reasons why you would not want to delete the recovery partition:

1. If it is a holdover from an upgrade from Windows 7 or Windows 8 and the manufacturer put their factory restore image in the recovery partition. This does not apply to pure Windows 10 computers because if there is manufacturer specific info for factory recovery that is now included as a provisioning package contained in the partition that contains the OS itself. You can still delete a recovery partition from Windows 7 or 8 and it will not affect Windows 10 - it will only remove the potential to restore the computer back to the factory Windows 7 or 8 if desired.

2. The recovery partition and the system partition have been combined. If the recovery partition has the word "system" appearing inside the parenthesis in disk management then this is the partition the computer is booting from and cannot be deleted without first moving the boot files to another partition.

If neither one of those two reasons apply, then you can delete the recovery partition.

NavyLCDR said:

There are two different partitions that we are talking about here, and I think they are getting confused. Seeing a screenshot of disk management would help:
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...creenshot.html

There is a System Reserved partition. On UEFI computers this is called the EFI System partition. This is the partition the computer boots from. In disk management, look inside the parenthesis (). One partition should have the word System inside the parenthesis. This is the partition that the computer boots from and must be present. Now on legacy BIOS computers the system partition the computer boots from can be part of the big partition that has the OS on it, it can part of the recovery partition, or it can be it's own partition. On a UEFI computer, this partition is always the EFI System partition and must be FAT32.

The other partition we are talking about is the System Recovery partition. In Windows 10, the recovery partition is completely option and is not required for Windows 10 to work. You can delete the recovery partition. All the standard recovery partition created by Windows 10 does is provide the recovery menu. You can also get to the recovery menu by booting from a Windows 10 installation USB flash drive or DVD. There are 2 reasons why you would not want to delete the recovery partition:

1. If it is a holdover from an upgrade from Windows 7 or Windows 8 and the manufacturer put their factory restore image in the recovery partition. This does not apply to pure Windows 10 computers because if there is manufacturer specific info for factory recovery that is now included as a provisioning package contained in the partition that contains the OS itself. You can still delete a recovery partition from Windows 7 or 8 and it will not affect Windows 10 - it will only remove the potential to restore the computer back to the factory Windows 7 or 8 if desired.

2. The recovery partition and the system partition have been combined. If the recovery partition has the word "system" appearing inside the parenthesis in disk management then this is the partition the computer is booting from and cannot be deleted without first moving the boot files to another partition.

If neither one of those two reasons apply, then you can delete the recovery partition.

Thanks for stepping in NavyLCDR. I'm really not up to speed on UEFI partitioning and you obviously are. I was also mixing up the OP's issues with another person who I was helping. BTW, the issue I was having a few days ago with my recovery partition (not UEFI) was solved with your help and that of dalchina. Could you please help the OP if he has any additional questions.

Inside Install.wim. There may be two images, Home and Pro. You can use either, winre.wim is the same for both.

Look in Install.wim\1\ Windows\system32\Recovery folder.

smirnovAl said:

I didn't quite understand where I have to copy "winre.wim" and "reagent.xml" files from. .

SIW2 said:

Inside Install.wim. There may be two images, Home and Pro. You can use either, winre.wim is the same for both.

Look in Install.wim\1\ Windows\system32\Recovery folder.

Keep in mind that in order to explore install.wim and copy files from it, a folder must be created on the hard drive and the install.wim file must be mounted to the folder created using the DISM command.

You can use the 7-zip GUI for easy extraction of files from iso/wim/esd/rar/zip/etc... 7-Zip

SIW2 said:

You can use the 7-zip GUI for easy extraction of files from wim/esd/rar/zip/etc... 7-Zip

Cool, I'll check that out! Thanks!