Windows recovery image file not found

[bbuchanan]

Hello, this is a follow-up to case 05873745.

For an unknown reason Veeam was failing to find the Windows Recovery Image (or it was corrupt?) on two new VMs deployed as a SQL Server Failover Cluster.

After working with Support and researching how to repair/rebuild the recovery environment I combined KB 2685 with Microsoft's "Deploying WindowsRE" and a few other pages to come up with a solution that worked.

KB 2685 is kind of incomplete. For example reagentc /setreimage doesn't work if the Recovery Environment is enabled, it's missing the commands to disable and to enable. There's also a caveat that reagent /disable copies the bad winre.wim (and reagent.xml) to C:\windows\system32\recovery, overwriting the copy from the install.wim.

It also doesn't address recovery partitions, and if you simply disable, copy, setreimage and enable, the winre.wim actually gets copied to C:\Recovery and not the recovery partition.

These commands are a REFERENCE of what I worked out from KB2685, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windo ... windows-11 and other Google results. Don't run these unless directed by Support.

Gather info on the current Recovery Environment. If enabled, note the current status and location.

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reagentc /info

Disable Recovery Environment

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reagentc /disable

Launch diskpart in an elevated command prompt

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diskpart

Find and Format the recovery partition

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list volume

If the volume isn't apparent, examine the disks

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list disk
select disk 0
list partition

The recovery partition will have a Type value of "Recovery"

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select partition 1
list volume

Format the recovery partition still inside diskpart

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format quick fs=ntfs label="Recovery"

Assign a drive letter

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assign

Exit diskpart

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exit

Mount the server ISO, the commands below assumes it received drive D:

Mount install.wim

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mkdir C:\dism
dism /mount-image /imagefile:D:\sources\install.wim /index:1 /mountdir:C:\dism /readonly /optimize

Copy the recovery files

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robocopy /mir C:\dism\windows\system32\Recovery\ C:\Windows\System32\Recovery\

Unmount install.wim

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dism /unmount-image /mountdir:C:\dism /discard

The following assumes the recovery partition was assigned drive letter E:

Make a directory for the recovery environment

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mkdir E:\Recovery\WindowsRE

Copy the winre.wim to the recovery partitoin

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xcopy /h C:\Windows\System32\Recovery\Winre.wim E:\Recovery\WindowsRE

Set the recovery environment image path to the recovery partition

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reagentc /setreimage /path E:\Recovery\WindowsRE /target C:\Windows

Enable the Recovery Environment

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reagentc /enable

Review the recovery environment information, noting the status and location. If the recovery partition is partition 1, the path should reflect that.

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reagentc /info

Remove the drive letter from the recovery partition

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diskpart
list volume
select volume x
remove
exit

After all that the agent job ran successfully.

[Dima P.]

Hello Brian,

Thank you for sharing the details with the community, I'll pass your post to the team and we will discuss if we can improve the current KB article.

[ksl28]

Your guide worked like a charm! Just fixed several clients at our end.
Only thing that was not working was the "regaentc /enable", because there was a typo

Thanks for sharing!

[Dima P.]

Kristian,

Thank you for the comment, sharp eye! Corrected the typo in the original post!