I've found myself in this very odd situation recently - clean install of Windows 10 64-bit (BIOS mode / not UEFI), installed with the 1803 installer. It installed fine, then Windows Update kicked in and it updated to 22H2, no problem there. However, when it attempted to install 202401 security update (KB5034441), it returned error 80070643 which according to the Internet means that the recovery partition doesn't have enough space to do the update.
I attempted to follow Microsoft's instructions which are in fact wrong. It correctly instructs how to use diskpart to shrink the OS partition by 250MB (cool trick in that it can be done to a live Windows installation, I'm going to have to make a note of it), then it says to delete the recovery partition in diskpart, recreate it, then re-enable the recovery environment with reagentc /enable, except of course that command failed saying that it cannot find the necessary information to re-enable the recovery environment.
I attempted to read up on using dism to convert esd files to wim files then extract winre.wim from Win10 install data but those instructions didn't match up with reality partway through and so I decided to nuke the install and start over, and 80070643 happened again with the same update.
This time around I thought I'm going to be a slightly cleverer bunny and back up the recovery partition data before nuking it, only to find there was only one file in there with nothing in it. I was about to take some extra precautions when I thought I ought to use reagentc /enable on the existing recovery partition first which took a little while and then said that it's all good. Slightly puzzled by the delay, I robocopy'd the data from the recovery partition again and this time there is winre.wim in it!
Partly I'm wondering if the size of the partition isn't the issue and the lack of winre.wim is actually the reason for 80070643 in this case so I'm going to try the update again now, but nothing about this situation seems normal.
I'm doubly concerned because I've seen 80070643 on a Win11 install recently (upgraded from a clean install of Win10 IIRC), so I have the feeling that this isn't going to be my last encounter with recovery partition shenanigans. Can anyone here explain what's going on? Does anyone here know how to remake a functional WinRE partition/setup from scratch?
- edit - Ok, so simply running reagentc /enable didn't allow the update to install (tried rebooting too), so I made the partition as per MS's instructions here:
On this attempt, I had already robocopy'd the recovery partition data but out of curiosity I then did a search of C drive for all instances of winre.wim and I found several including one that absolutely was not there on the previous clean install. I'm wondering if I should run reagentc /enable on every clean Windows install I do as a precaution. After following the instructions (which did work this time), the update installed successfully.
I wonder if WinRE not being correctly set up is another bug in the installation routines of Win10/11, just like the one I regularly but not always find being that system restore is either disabled for no good reason, or its allocation is set to zero, etc.
I attempted to follow Microsoft's instructions which are in fact wrong. It correctly instructs how to use diskpart to shrink the OS partition by 250MB (cool trick in that it can be done to a live Windows installation, I'm going to have to make a note of it), then it says to delete the recovery partition in diskpart, recreate it, then re-enable the recovery environment with reagentc /enable, except of course that command failed saying that it cannot find the necessary information to re-enable the recovery environment.
I attempted to read up on using dism to convert esd files to wim files then extract winre.wim from Win10 install data but those instructions didn't match up with reality partway through and so I decided to nuke the install and start over, and 80070643 happened again with the same update.
This time around I thought I'm going to be a slightly cleverer bunny and back up the recovery partition data before nuking it, only to find there was only one file in there with nothing in it. I was about to take some extra precautions when I thought I ought to use reagentc /enable on the existing recovery partition first which took a little while and then said that it's all good. Slightly puzzled by the delay, I robocopy'd the data from the recovery partition again and this time there is winre.wim in it!
Partly I'm wondering if the size of the partition isn't the issue and the lack of winre.wim is actually the reason for 80070643 in this case so I'm going to try the update again now, but nothing about this situation seems normal.
I'm doubly concerned because I've seen 80070643 on a Win11 install recently (upgraded from a clean install of Win10 IIRC), so I have the feeling that this isn't going to be my last encounter with recovery partition shenanigans. Can anyone here explain what's going on? Does anyone here know how to remake a functional WinRE partition/setup from scratch?
- edit - Ok, so simply running reagentc /enable didn't allow the update to install (tried rebooting too), so I made the partition as per MS's instructions here:
On this attempt, I had already robocopy'd the recovery partition data but out of curiosity I then did a search of C drive for all instances of winre.wim and I found several including one that absolutely was not there on the previous clean install. I'm wondering if I should run reagentc /enable on every clean Windows install I do as a precaution. After following the instructions (which did work this time), the update installed successfully.
I wonder if WinRE not being correctly set up is another bug in the installation routines of Win10/11, just like the one I regularly but not always find being that system restore is either disabled for no good reason, or its allocation is set to zero, etc.
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