How to pick the "right" Windows Recovery

Jeeves · 15 Jul 2017

Hi everybody,

I have Windows 10 v.1703 Creators, but when I start Windows Recovery (Restart+shift key) and open the command prompt,
I get a There are no administrators message.
If I create a Recovery USB Drive (with recoverydrive.exe on the same system), boot from it and go to the RE command prompt,
the Ver command shows "Version 6.3.9600" which is Windows 8.1.

Fact is, it was originally a Windows 8 system upgraded to 10, then to the Anniversary Update, then to Creators.

On disk there are 2 WinRE partitions:

A: 900 MB, second partition on disk just after the small "System" partition.
In the "Recovery" directory, there is a winre.wim file dating back to 2014!

B: 788 MB, at the end, after the OS partition.
Winre.wim file has date april 2017.

To be clear, diskpart lists as follow:
partition 1: SYSTEM 100MB
partition 2: WinRE A 900MB
partition 3: MS Reserved 128MB
partition 4: OS (Windows10 C: ),
partition 5: data (I created this data partition, very recently, after shrinking C)
partition 6: WinRE B 788MB

It's UEFI GPT.

reagentc /info says Windows Recovery is at ...\partition2\Recovery\WindowsRE.

Seems to me that Windows created a new WinRE somewhere along upgrades, but picked the "wrong" partition, the original one.

Question: how do I set Windows 10 to use the other, possibly "correct", Windows Environment?

Thanks!

lx07 · 15 Jul 2017

in diskpart add drive letter T to partition 6:
select disk 0
select partition 6
assign letter = T

In a separate administrator command prompt:
Reagentc /setreimage /path T:\Recovery\WindowsRE /target C:\Windows

In diskpart remove the drive letter again:
remove

Then check reagentc /info again.

Deploy Windows RE

You could then delete partition 2 and if you wanted use partition wizard to shuffle all the others over to the left a bit to reclaim the space. Alternatively you could copy the WinRE.wim from 6 to 2 and delete 6. And then re-register WinRE.wim.

If you leave a too small recovery partition Windows seems to create a new one on each upgrade but yours seems big enough so I'm not sure the reason you got 2... Perhaps there was insufficient free space.

Jeeves · 15 Jul 2017

Done. It did not change info at first.
Had to reagentc /disable before reagentc /setreimage and enable again.
Now it's set to the other WinRE. Thank you!
I am going to try how it goes.

lx07 · 15 Jul 2017

Good news.

It may be a good idea to delete one or the other WinRE partitions (partition order doesn't matter so either would do) or you may get more partitions created every upgrade... You could always wait and see of course.

Jeeves · 15 Jul 2017

For the record, in the process Windows deleted the old Winre.wim (Windows Eight's), ReAgent.xml and boot.sdi from the original 900 MB Recovery Environment--which I am not going to use any longer anyway, so it's not a problem.

Now everything works fine. I can boot to Recovery command prompt: the "no administrators" error is gone, and Ver shows current Windows 10 version.

As to removing the old unused WinRE partition, I was thinking along the lines of diskpart del override.
Yet I am in doubt as to what to do with the reclaimed space.
I just wouldn't want to "confuse" Windows boot.
Maybe I will create a new NTFS *hidden* partition in place of the original hidden Recovery partition.

As a side note, the entire (GPT SSD) drive is "disk 1" in diskpart, while another drive (GPT HDD, for data only) is seen as disk 0. The other drive is on a lower SATA port in UEFI BIOS, but I can't change that in BIOS.

Jeeves · 15 Jul 2017

After I edited the partition table, Windows could not find WinRE.

Had to use Reagentc /setreimage again. :)
It's all set now.