Security Update for Windows 10, 2024-11, KB5048239 getting error 0x80070643 when installing

My "Recovery" partition has 563,263,211 bytes showing as "used", and 972,881,920 bytes showing as "free".

This is much more free-space than the "required 250 MB".

Hmm.

This is yet another "fail" for Microsoft's "Quality Assurance" department. :-(

Joyce, going back to Win10 won't help. This is started on my Windows 10 machine and last night appeared on my Windows 11 computer.
I went through the repartitioning process (I understand such things) according to MS instructions, and it reported that it did not need to be resized. Yet the error still occurs.

I think the problem is that there is no one at MS who understands how the original code works, and there is no one to train new employees. This issue has been going on for months for many of us.

I've also run DISM, sfc /scannow, chkdsk, troubleshooter, rebooting and retrying, booting into safe mode, restarting the Update Services in a variety of ways, virus scans, resetting windows components (e.g. net stop wuauserv etc.)
Nothing works.

My recovery partitions in Windows 10 have as follows: 990MB (1st partition), 15.83GB (2nd partition) and 1.33GB (3rd partition). All well within the requirements of the recovery environment for this update to successfully install. I, too, believe this is once again an oversight on the part of Microsoft in checking their updates before release. Exactly the same thing happened earlier this year, i.e. same error and same type of update. So, someone at Microsoft missed the problem and sent it out as an update again. With this much negative feedback I hope that Microsoft owns up to it and rescinds the update as it is not working.

This is for my Windows 10 machine, which has a recovery partition that is gigabytes in size. I have not run this for my Win11 machine.

C:\Windows\system32>reagentc /info
Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration
Information:

Windows RE status:         Enabled  
Windows RE location:       \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition3\Recovery\WindowsRE  
Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: 7c9570ac-675a-11ec-86ae-e0cb4ebb2b6e  
Recovery image location:  
Recovery image index:      0  
Custom image location:  
Custom image index:        0  

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

C:\Windows\system32>dir c:\windows\system32\recovery /a
Volume in drive C is Samsung Source Disk
Volume Serial Number is BE34-C6B0

Directory of c:\windows\system32\recovery

2024-11-13 12:56 PM <DIR> .
2024-11-13 12:56 PM <DIR> ..
2024-11-13 12:57 PM 1,077 ReAgent.xml
2019-06-12 10:40 AM 1,118 ReAgent_Merged.xml1
2023-02-15 07:40 AM 777,602,343 Winre.wim
3 File(s) 777,604,538 bytes
2 Dir(s) 54,091,431,936 bytes free

C:\Windows\system32>reagentc /enable
REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

After lots of powershell commands, Claude 3 says
"Since we've confirmed:

1. WinRE is properly enabled and configured
2. The Windows Update service is now running
3. Updates are successfully installing (as shown by the log)
4. Your recovery partition is much larger than needed (87GB vs required 250MB)

It's looking like:

• The original recovery partition warning might have been a false positive
• The system should be able to install updates normally now that the service is running
• The large recovery partition isn't actually causing any problem" The original problem remains, error 0x80070643

I am glad that this worked for you, however some of us are not having any luck using the instructions given earlier and retrying the install several times - both with and without re-starting and/or powering down the computer. This continues to be exactly the same problem seen earlier this year with the WINRE environment. I don't know why MSoft can't get this update right, but they've proven that they can't at least twice. The suggestion below about ditching MS stock is a little over the top, but it seems like a real possibility if this keeps up and Windows users can't rely on clean updates. Inconsistency when updating any OS leaves a very troubling question in your mind if you continue to see that they can't get it right...