Create Reset Recovery Image in Windows 10  

Steve C said:

Thanks for clarifying this. I now see that the winre.wim file on the recovery partition is only 335MB so it can't be a recovery image. My original recovery image was the Dell Windows 8.1 factory image but that's not useful now I have Windows 10 which is why I've set Windows 10 Build 1511 as the recovery image. I have a Dell factory recovery Windows 8.1 USB anyway. I only wish we had the option of a custom refresh image.

I haven't found any way to set the custom refresh image. Now, I have done something different on my Nextbook Windows Tablet, but I don't know if it would actually work or not. It came with Windows 8.1 with Bing installed. I know it is next to impossible to download a standard Windows 8.1 with Bing install ISO so the first thing I did was create an image of the complete 32 GB memory using Macrium Reflect to restore in case Windows 10 failed. Then I did a clean install of Windows 10, which read the product key stored in Bios for Windows 8.1 for activation.

That created the EFI boot partition, the 128mb empty space, OS partition and Recovery partition - which contained only the WindowsRE environment. I made the WindowsRE files readable by doing attrib -h -s on them. Copied them to the SD card. Deleted the recovery partition, shrunk the C: drive partition and moved it to the end of the "disk". Deleted the 128mb empty space. Expanded the EFI boot partition to about 5gb in size.

Then I copied the Windows 10 WindowsRE files to the EFI boot partition and copied the install.wim file for the factory Windows 8.1 from my backup image to the EFI boot partition. Then I set the reagentc OSImage and WindowsRE pointers to the correct folders in my combined EFI Boot and Recovery partition and enabled reagentc.

I know the WindowsRE environment works because that is easy to test. In theory, if I select the reset option from the recovery menu, I should get the factory Windows 8.1 with Bing restored. Haven't tested that yet (I still have my Macrium Reflect image backup). If I want to "reset" Windows 10, I can just an in-place upgrade repair install of my Windows 10 install USB.

According to MSDN (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...(v=vs.85).aspx) the /setosimage setting is not used by WIndows 10. If this is the case, please take down this tutorial as it is misleading.

I verified in a VM that windows 10 will in fact do an image-less reset without the /setosimage setting used.

are you sure? it says right in the box under /setosimage "This setting is not used in Windows 10." It also says "Registers the location of a push-button reset image in an online or offline image."

As far as refresh images go, I think that uses "recimg /setcurrent" and not reagentc. https://www.winhelp.us/custom-recove...windows-8.html

Although MS docs have been wrong before.

I did that and it does get listed as the recovery image. But who knows if it actually uses it? I suppose I can test this by first booting into audit mode and installing some random program or changing the wallpaper, the generalizing the system and boot into a PE to capture the image in DISM and registering the newly created image with /setosimage. If your a right, then doing a Reset my PC with the "remove everything" option should restore the machine with the program or wallpaper still there.

What's the point of specifying a different image then?

So there's no way to create a customized image with all your favorite programs preinstalled to recover to?