Cannot set path to winre.wim

Question

I'm trying to restore recovery partition on my PC to prepare it for Win 11 update. So, I don't have recovery partition and I don't have winre.wim file. I copied winre.wim from another PC and placed it in system32>recovery folder. When I search for it (dir /a /s c:\winre.wim), windows finds it in the location where I copied it:

Next, I try to set path to it using "reagentc /setreimage /path [path of Winre.wim]", and that apparently works as well:

But when I check if the path has been established using "reagentc /info" I get empty path:

Using "reagentc /enable" results in "operation successful". But in reality nothing is successful because WinRE status is still disabled and winre.win location is still empty:

What is going on here?

Answer 1

Hello SrdjanMaksimovic

You can get a fresh copy of Winre.wim out of the install.wim or install.esd of Windows 10 installation media, which you can download if you want (just have it generate an ISO and then mount the ISO file. The install.wim or install.esd folder will be in the Sources folder). You'll need to use DISM to temporarily mount the install.wim or install.esd to an empty folder (there are guides out there for this), and then go into that folder and browse to \Windows\System32\Recovery. It will be there. I'm not sure what happened to your Winre.wim file in the first place though, since on Windows systems it's supposed to be either on the Recovery partition or still in the \Windows\System32\Recovery folder of your Windows partition if you don't have a Recovery partition.

So you can copy Winre.wim to that default \Windows\System32\Recovery folder of your Windows partition, but actually getting WinRE enabled would require properly setting up a Recovery partition, copying the file over there, using ReagentC to set the path to that partition as your WinRE location, and THEN enabling WinRE. That's all a bit more involved.

More details about ReagentC: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/reagentc-command-line-options?view=windows-11

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