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The Server 2022 Recovery Partition has been causing all sorts of pain lately.

  1. By default it places this partition at the end of the disk which makes it impossible to extend the primary partition without doing some sort of partition rearrangement.

  2. This months update fails on all of our 2022 servers since that partition is too small for some updates it's trying to apply. This partition is before the primary partition which now makes it non-trivial to expand.

So I was going to see if I could just created a small dependent disk and just have the Recovery Partition be housed all on it's own.

I'm working in a vSphere environment.

There was a nice step by step by @VainMan here --> How to move the recovery partition on Windows 10? Everything appears to go well and the copied Recovery Partition is placed on the new volume. Even when I do a reagentc /info, it shows that it is enabled. Disk Management shows it as a Healthy (Recovery Partition)

However, when I try to test this via reagentc /boottore then reboot, I get the following:

Boot Manager Error

Prior to doing the steps in the above link, I did verify that the Recovery Partition did work via reagentc /boottore. Soon as I copy it over to the new volume, it no longer works.

I also verified that the identifiers were correct via bcdedit.

Is what I'm doing even possible or am I missing something?

Giacomo1968
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LuckyMe
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    "I could just create a small dependent disk and just have the Recovery Partition be housed all on it's own." - You could but you would have the same problem, Windows would be unable to extend or rebuild the WinRE partition, forcing you to rebuild it yourself. The WinRE partition most certainly should NOT exist before the system partition. It should exist after the Windows partition, which makes the recreation and expansion of the partition, trivial. This says as much. – Ramhound Jan 11 '24 at 22:41
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    I suggest using Microsoft's instructions to create the WinRE partition. – Ramhound Jan 11 '24 at 22:46
  • Or try the MS script to fix the update failure: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-shares-script-to-update-windows-10-winre-with-bitlocker-fixes/ . Note their warning the script comes with no warranty. – DrMoishe Pippik Jan 11 '24 at 23:09
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    Here is the direct link. So the script applies the updated WinRE image but doesn’t fix the size issue with the partition itself. – Ramhound Jan 12 '24 at 02:38
  • Thanks all for responding!

    @Ramhound - Prior to server 2022, the WinRE Partition was always before the primary. In a VM environment, this worked just fine because now and then we need to extend the primary. Once 2022 come along, we no longer could do this. This was a problem. So we adjusted our 2022 image via GParted to match how all previous versions of Server, which allowed us to extend the Primary if the need arose. Partitions in this day of VM's seem antiquated and should just use separate VMDK's instead of Partitions. That way each one can be expanded via hypervisor as needed.

     – LuckyMe Jan 12 '24 at 16:13
  • @Ramhound - The instructions for creating a WinRE partition in your second link states "This requires your device to have the recovery partition after the OS partition." This is not an option for the reason stated earlier. – LuckyMe Jan 12 '24 at 16:13
  • @Ramhound - Your last link looks interesting as a temp fix but doesn't address why creating this partition on it's own volume doesn't seem to work. Perhaps we'll just blow this away completely since we have never used it in the past. If there is an issue, we just restore from backup. My only concern is maybe down the road MS will wield this partition differently and will be required from whatever they dream up next. – LuckyMe Jan 12 '24 at 16:14
  • @DrMoishe Pippik - This link looks like this addresses the issue if you are using bitlocker. We are not on the servers. – LuckyMe Jan 12 '24 at 16:14
  • WinRE partition isn’t required, it’s highly recommended, but not required. You can place the WinRE wherever you want but don’t expect it to have the capacity to expand when you do which is the reason it’s supposed to be the last partition. But it doesn’t have to be and those instructions would regardless of where the partition is – Ramhound Jan 12 '24 at 16:17
  • @LuckyMe, MS has added the new, larger WIM for WinRE partition for all machines, *whether or not the PC uses BitLocker. For that matter, it was applied to machines such as Win 10 Home, which can't implement BitLocker. That said, the fix might or might not help on your machines. – DrMoishe Pippik Jan 12 '24 at 17:27
  • @Ramhound - "But it doesn’t have to be and those instructions would regardless of where the partition is" Yes that is true but it will make the WinRE partition to the right of the primary....which is not an option for us since the primary does much more frequently get expanded in our VM's than this partition. Hence why I'm trying to get this to work on it's own volume. Would be a win - win but can't seem to get it to work. :( – LuckyMe Jan 18 '24 at 17:18

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