WinRE partition not set properly after hard disk image restored to another disk

My brother's AIO computer unbelievably came with a 128GB SSD and 1TB disk. Naturally the SSD got swamped and ran out of space rendering the OS inoperable.

Acronis True Image 2020 was used to back up the entire disk, but since the intention was to restore the OS partition with enlarged size, I couldn't perform a one-for-one disk restore (which would have kept C: squeezed at 118GB).

I initially sequentially restored

• ESP/EFI partition.
• boot record.
• OS partition enlarged to 930GB.
• WinRE partition inflated from 850MB to 1.2GB to take up the rest of the disk.

Notice the the Microsoft Reserved partition (MSR) is missing because Acronis True Image does not make that partition available for individual restoration. But despite only having three out of the four standard partition a Windows system is supposed to have, it need manage to boot up just fine.

However on reading documentation it appears the MSR partition does have some critical role (though not very clearly stated) to play in future even if it's empty for now. So I redid the restoration with

• EFI partition.
• boot record.
• diskpart to manually insert msr 16MB partition
• OS partition enlarged to 930GB
• WinRE partition inflated to remaining space.

With this layout however, Windows could not both up with

A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed. Error Code: 0xc0000225

Following others' advice on fixing the boot record with bootrec and bootsect, I managed to get Windows booting up again. I will skip the details because the next problem is the concern of this post - the disconnected WinRE partition.

PS C:\> reagentc /info 

Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration 

Information: 

    Windows RE status:         Disabled 

    Windows RE location: 

    Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 

    Recovery image location: 

    Recovery image index:      0 

    Custom image location: 

    Custom image index:        0 

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

The partition has already been set with

set id="de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac"

gpt attributes=0x8000000000000001

and Disk Management does see it as a healthy Recovery Partition.

I try setting the RE image location and enabling it and it seems to be successful.

PS C:\> reagentc /setreimage /path T:\Recovery\WindowsRE /target C:\windows 

Directory set to: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition4\Recovery\WindowsRE 

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful. 

PS C:\> reagentc /enable 

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

However reagentc /info shows it is still disabled like above and doesn't know where the WinRE partition/path is. What else needs to be done to properly restore WinRE partition to a functional state?