...and to add yet another anomaly to the v1709 FCE W10 update scenario, there have been reports that on some UEFI/GPT configured Systems, the EFI System partition, which normally has no LETTER assigned to it, now has a LETTER assigned... some have seen Z: The EFI System partition still does not need to be lettered... keep your eye out. It just may be a product of a mucked up major System upgrade... GO MicroSloth!
Hi Froggie May I have your advice as to how to investigate & determine which of a number of recovery partitions I should keep and which I can safely dispense of so as to reclaim useable disk space by merging it/them with my system partition? Much appreciated if you can spare me the time. Regards, Baldrick
This is not biblical, Balders, so pls take it with a grain of salt. On the "usual" fresh install of Windows 10 (OEMs may be different), four partitions are created... the EFI System partition, the MicroSloth System Reserved (MSR) partition, the Windows Recovery partition (WRE, the one that keeps changing in size at most of these major System upgrades) and the standard Windows OS partition (usually c: ). Some OEMs add their own OEM Recovery partition to allow users access to an F-key recovery process that takes the System back to its out-of-box configuration. That said, the initial WRE partition is usually created prior to the Windows OS partition on a fresh install. It's this very issue that caused MS to have to create a whole new partition when it needed to expand the existing WRE. It did this initially by shrinking the existing OS partition by an amount of space it needed to add its new, larger WRE partition during most major upgrades. Following this process, the WRE partition, now FOLLOWING the OS partition, became the lead WRE partition and the original WRE partition became abandoned... MS wasn't even smart enough to delete the outdated partition (which it could have done easily leaving unallocated space in its wake). This is what has cause all the confusion along the way... multiple WRE partitions. It seems to do this process at most of its major updates, each time abandoning the previous WRE partition. This has caused multiple useless old WREs to remain on one's System depending on where the System started. It's really been a mess. After saying all that, I can only guess on the logic used to establish the WRE in use after an upgrade... "Will the real WRE please stand up." In almost all cases it will be the one directly following the OS partition and will most likely be the largest (since the upgrade keeps creating a large WRE when needed). That would be my guess only. One could assign drive letters to that partition and look at internal file creation dates and look for the newest... that sounds like it could also be a possible plan. Many users say just leave them all there (since they're small <less than a gB) and forget about them... let MS figure it all out, sounds like a safe approach as well. I can't really tell you which way to approach this correctly... with MicroSloth, there are no hard and fast rules as of yet (at least that I know of... others may have better solutions). My approach... I have never moved a production System I've been responsible for off of Windows 7 to date. Widows 10 has offered me absolutely nothing in my production environment to make my life or my System's life any easier, but it has added an ungodly amount of anomalies (such as the one being discussed here) causing much pain along the way. Examples... perfectly compatible programs being removed from the System for being "incompatible," partition resizing which has caused havoc with many programs requiring consistency in partition sizes (most scheduled or automatic imaging Systems), massive privacy concerns, and many other lesser but painful issues. I don't know when this is all going to stop (with MS), but until something comes along that I absolutely require from W10 or MS fully abandons W7, W10 only runs in my personal laboratory and nowhere else. In that same laboratory, I have been moving towards the production use of LINUX on my Systems. The process has been slow due to certain Windows-only app requirements but it is moving forward. I don't know how long this effort will take or whether I'll really reach a useful endpoint but to be honest, Windows 10 (and beyond with Microsoft) has become a scary proposition to me, requiring even more IT attention than any previous OS. All this IMHO, by the way...
Something I forgot to add to the missive above... Up until the most recent Intel chipsets (still investigating W7 support), all Systems that I have obtained for anybody's use, and if they support Legacy-MBR as well as UEFI-GPT, I have built the System disks to be Legacy-MBR. In doing this, a fresh install of W10 into the unallocated space of a Legacy-MBR configured disk produces only 2-partitions... the MSR partition (it's made ACTIVE and BOOTs from there) and the Windows OS partition. Under this configuration, the MS Recovery function is maintained in the OS partition. This should eliminate the need for all this WRE recovery partition recreation during the major W10 upgrades. And if you really want to simplify things, the MSR functions may all be moved to the OS partition allowing the elimination of the MSR partition all together... yup, just like the old days with only 1-ACTIVE partition required for BOOTing. This configuration works well if done correctly, but I cannot guarantee in any way whether future W10 upgrades will continue to respect this configuration... with W10, MS is just too unpredictable.
hi may i ask you a question? after several failures with image for windows/linux , i would like to try to do it with macrium i have a source a ssd ,it's 250GB with windows 10 mbr , 3 partitions i want to restore to 1Tb samsung SSD 960 PRO NVMe M.2 it's my friend comptuer,ssd and samsung 960 hardware he wants to slip his 1Tb samsung SSD 960 PRO NVMe M.2 at least in 2 partitions in short he want to restore his ssd 250 in SSD 960 PRO NVMe M.2 , leaving 1tb-250GB unlocated space just because he want to install other os i have the macrium last built rescue disk on my usb ,can i do with macium? how can i do? create an image , and restore to the SSD 960 PRO NVMe M.2 to leave 1tb -250 unlocated ,what settings should i use thanks
Baldrick, First, determine which is the RE in use. Open an Admin Command Prompt and type in... reagentc /info The output will be several lines, resembling this... Windows RE status: Enabled Windows RE location: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition2\Recovery\WindowsRE Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: b45c4e16-1b1a-11e7-9cda-8429983162c5 Recovery image location: Recovery image index: 0 Custom image location: Custom image index: 0 This indicates my RE in use is on HD0, partition2. Now determine which is partition2. Using the same Admin Command Prompt type in these lines (Enter after each)... diskpart list disk select disk 0 list par Now you know the partition numbers and the RE in use. You can delete the other REs, slide the RE in use to the end of the Unallocated Free Space and resize the Windows partition. If this is confusing, post a screenshot of Disk Management.
Thanks Froggie, thanks Brian K Will digest all of the information provided and proceed with care. Regards, Baldrick
TRF, This is a new development. I just did a Win10 1709 upgrade and the old RE had been deleted and was represented by Free Space. The Windows partition had been resized 838 MiB smaller and a RE created in that space. Edit... the data in the new RE is 482 MiB. Too big for the old RE. Strangely, the data in my desktop RE is 380 MiB. I didn't get a new RE. The Winre.wim are different sizes in each computer's RE.
Anyone else having trouble starting a backup after the Windows Update? Mine has been stuck on "Creating Snapshot" for over half an hour...
No problem with backups here. I got the latest win 10 update last night. Did a backup with EaseUS and Macrium free 7.1, both up to date. Both ran fine and backups are on external Western Digital Passports. I always do 2 just in case. So I've got backups for Win 10 last and newest, just in case. Both started fast and were done in around 15 minutes.
You know what, after a few weeks I have received this: Macrium Reflect 7 Workstation Quantity 1 Keys: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx What's the Workstation edition? Can I input the key to the free edition as well?
Strangely, I did not experience this on either of my two machines (see 'before' and 'after' Disk management below). All scheduled backups (incremental, differential) proceeded normally, no new full backups.
That's because your existing WRE partition is already large enough to handle the increases needed by the newer Recovery environment. You'll be fine... for a while I do notice that you already have one previous WRE (most likely from a previous major System update) in your MicroSloth wasteland of WREs
This whole process depends on one's System Disk Geometry at the time of the update. The original problem started with a System "clean installed" in an unallocated area as follows... EFI System - MS SRP - WRE - OS ...and the WRE was pretty small. You can see when it came time to upgrade, and a bigger WRE area was needed, MicroSloth only knows how to "shrink" and "expand" partitions and likes to work with the trailing area of a partition. With the above layout it shrunk the OS partition by the new amount of space and created yet another, larger WRE, abandoning the original WRE in the process... EFI System - MS SRP - WRE (orig) - OS (smaller) - WRE (new, bigger) That was fine 'til it ran out of WRE space needed for yet another upgrade, then it tweaks again. I have no idea what logic it uses, and can't even guess what havoc is wreaked with imaging/snapshot apps that rely on defined disk geometries... that's why I offer the WARNING I do. Some will be lucky, some won't. It's nice, based on Brian_K's NOTE above, that Windows seems to have learned how to recycle, somewhat, the most recently used WRE... it has no idea how to deal with the ones its already cast into the wasteland in the past.
As I mentioned, I have yet to completely discover the logic used by MicroSloth to make the determinations it does... someday I surely WILL NOT investigate the WIM differences between different WinREs on different System configs... I just don't have that deep of an interest. Some young whipper snapper can take that on if they wish...
A comparison of the various Macrium Reflect home and business editions is provided on this web page. There's really no difference between the Home and Workstation editions except that "Premium Support" is available to licensed users of the latter edition as noted on this web page. The Free edition requires no license key and upgrading requires re-installation. The Free edition can't be upgraded merely by entering the license key for some other edition.
There's not really much to investigate. As Brian K mentioned above, not all WinRE WIMs are exactly identical even for the same Windows version. Their functional capabilities are basically the same, but total size may vary somewhat depending on the machine's hardware configuration and related factors. Not greatly different from Reflect's WinPE builds in that respect. As for the MS "logic" involved, I know of none other than a very straightforward decision based on available space in the existing WinRE partition. If it's sufficient for the newer WIM image, the older one gets overwritten. If not, another larger partition is created. In the latter case, as you say, MS just shrinks the OS partition and creates the new one immediately thereafter.
Yes, true. At some point I want to get rid of it, but being a dozeball with partitions, etc. I will need step-by-step instructions. may I PM you when I'm ready, or should I post here?
This has happened since Windows 8. Windows should create a much bigger recovery partition when it´s first installed.
Either will work... there are many folks here on the Forums who are more than capable of helping as well, you might get a lot of options rather than just mine
As has been mentioned, open up a Command Prompt window in Admin Mode and run the command... reagentc /info The output will tell you which one Windows uses. My guess... it will be the 4th one (809mB). The 5th one, due to its size, is most likely a special OEM recovery partition, probably tied to an F-key, that regenerates your System to the out-of-box configuration.... most times leading to all DATA and added program loss. That 1st 1gB partition is completely unknown to me... I've never seen Windows generate such a partition. Lemme know what reagentc says...
