Moving Windows Recovery Partition Correctly
Recently I needed to expand a disk on a Windows 10 VM and a Windows Server 2022 VM, but I couldn’t because the Recovery Partition was in the way.
When searching for a way to do this I discovered that the internet is full of posts about simply deleting the Windows Recovery Partition. I am not a fan of simply deleting a recovery tool. On numerous occasions the recovery partition has been instrumental in helping me to fix a system.
If you search for how to move the Windows Recovery Partition the internet has many posts of fake ways to do it or ways to do it with third-party tools like GParted. I have nothing against third-party tools or GParted and I don’t doubt some of those methods do work. The issue I have with those methods is that you have to take the system offline in order to do them or the tools cost money.
Now yes you could just delete the Windows Recovery partition, but before you do that make sure you understand that you will lose a bunch of recovery options. You can read more about the recovery options you’ll lose in an earlier post I made about the Windows Recovery Partition.
Here’s how to correctly move the Windows Recovery Partition on a Windows server or a normal Windows system.
The Process
- Make sure you have a backup of the system you are going to edit the partitions on.
- Open Command Prompt as admin
Disabling The Windows Recovery Partition
- We need to disable the existing Windows Recovery Partition to do that run the command
reagentc /disable
The reagentc /disable command will disable the recovery partition and will move the recovery partition into a file named Winre.wim and will be located in C:\Windows\System32\Recovery (you have to enable showing hidden system files if you want to see it)
DiskPart
- Run the command
diskpartto launch DiskPart
- List the disks in your system. You can do this by using the command
list disk
Pro tip from Matt in the comments, if there’s a * in the column for Gpt that means the disk is likely a GPT disk and if there isn’t a * in the Gpt column the disk is likely MBR. Make a note of this as it will be important further down.
- Select the disk you need to move the recovery partition on. You can do this by using the command
select diskand the disk number. In my setup disk 0 was the correct disk and the command I entered wasselect disk 0.
- List the partitions on that disk. You can do this by using the command
list partition
- Select the recovery partition. You can do this by using the command
select partitionand the partition number. In my setup partition 4 is my recovery partition and the command I entered wasselect partition 4
The recovery partition is a protected partition so we need to use a bit more force to delete it.
- Force the deletion of the recovery partition. You can do this by using the command
delete partition override
Disk Management
Now if you look in Disk Management you should no longer have the Recovery Partition and it should show up as unallocated.
- Expand your disk and leave about 1024 MB off your resized size to leave room for the re-enabling the Recovery Partition.
Disk Management should now look something like this.
Once the disk is expanded we need to rebuild everything that is needed for Windows to know that the extra space that we left unallocated can be used to for the recovery partition.
- Create a New Simple Volume with the unallocated space.
- Don’t give it a drive letter.
- You can give the new partition a name if you want it does not mater. I’m going to call mine New Recovery.
Disk Management should now look something like this.
Back to DiskPart
- In DiskPart list your partitions again by running the command
list partition
- Select the 1024 MB partition with the command
select partitionand the partition number. In my setup it was partition 4 and the command I ran wasselect partition 4
If you have a GPT disk you need to run some very specific command and if you have an MBR disk you need to run different very specific commands.
GPT disk
On GPT disks we need to change the partition ID to de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac which tells Windows that this is a recovery partition
- Run the following command to set the partition as a recovery partition
set id=de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac
We also need to hide the drive and flag it as a required partition to do that we have to set a GPT attribute to 0x8000000000000001
- Run the following command to set the GPT attribute to hide the drive and flag it as required
gpt attributes=0x8000000000000001
- Now we can exist DiskPart.
MBR disk
On MBR disks we need to change partition ID to 27 which will tell Windows that this is a recovery partition.
- Run the following command to set the partition as a recovery partition
set id=27
- Now we can exist DiskPart.
Enabling The Windows Recovery Partition
- Now we can re-enable the recovery partition by running the command
reagentc /enable
The reagentc /enable command will copy the Winre.wim file from C:\Windows\System32\Recovery into our new recovery partition.
If you look at Disk Management again everything shows up correctly.
That’s all there is to it.
Technically speaking we did just delete the Windows Recovery Partition but we did so in a way to keep our existing recovery partition safely intact and then we rebuild the recovery partition and re-enabled it.
I prefer doing it this way as it leaves your recovery options intact and you can do it all live without any reboots.
If you want to read more about deploying the Windows Recovery Partition you can do so by reading Microsoft’s documentation about it.
If you want to read more about reagentc command you do so by reading Microsoft’s documentation about it.
95 responses to “Moving Windows Recovery Partition Correctly”
Thank you, I tried your solution and it worked very well. I like it because it does not need third party software and preserves recovery partition. Your description is very clear and detailed.
That’s awesome! I’m glad it worked out.
Agreed. This saved me a couple of hundred bucks!
Nice!!
So will this work, for whatever reason my recovery partition is at the beginning of my disk, and Im trying to allocate space to it, but it wont let me, since the C drive is where i’d steal from, and thats at the end of the disk. So if I delete my recovery partition in your example, will it pop back up at the beginning regardless?
Hi Larry,
As long as you disable the recovery partition before you delete it you should be good to go. I’d backup the system just to be extra safe.
When you enable the recovery partition it will go to which ever partition you have set with the recovery attributes (the section called Back to DiskPart) if the partition with the recovery attributes is at the front of the disk or the end of the disk it doesn’t seem to matter it will just go to whichever one has the attributes. I don’t know what happens if two partitions both have the recovery attributes set.
Thank you very much. I did it without need any third party soft.
No Problem!
Just what I needed for my Windows 10 VM.
The instructions are thoroughly explained and the accompanying visuals are quite useful.
Most importantly, it worked without any problems.
Awesome!
Agreed with Dzery – fantastic post, very easy to follow, doesn’t require third party software or rebooting, made upgrading my wife’s laptop very easy. I’d been struggling with thinking that Disk Management could move the partition, and had moved on to using gparted but wasn’t sure how to make that work. This was really easy and I think it took longer to read through it than to do it. Thanks, much appreciated!
I didn’t know if the PC’s setup was GPT or MBR. I Googled it, and it’s actually in your screenshot under the “list disk” command – in the “GPT” column, an asterisk indicates that the disk is setup as GPT; if that asterisk is not there, then it’s MBR.
oh Nice! I think it’s a lot more common to see GPT disks than MBR now. I almost didn’t add the MBR part.
Thanks again for the tip about how to tell if the disk is MBR or GPT easily. I’ve updated the post to add a comment about it.
Thank you so much, your solution worked. It was easy and clear.
Yay!
Worked well for me on Windows Server VM and my disk was also MBR
Yay!!
Hi, my recovery partition rebuilt itself on the 100MB EFI partition so I just have a 100MB recovery, data drive and 1GB data drive unused?
That shouldn’t be possible as if it does replace the EFI the system might not be able to boot up.
Can you open CMD as admin and run reagentc /info if it says Windows RE status Disabled you might have missed enabling it again or if some of the steps were missed it will enable it but put it in a folder on the computer instead of the recovery partition.
Can you post what the results of reagentc /info are as that will help.
Thanks, Daniel.
you are very welcome!
This process worked great for me. I was working with a VM in Azure, so third party tools were not really an option for me. Oddly enough my disk was an MBR disk. Many thanks to Matt for this comment: “I didn’t know if the PC’s setup was GPT or MBR. I Googled it, and it’s actually in your screenshot under the “list disk” command – in the “GPT” column, an asterisk indicates that the disk is setup as GPT; if that asterisk is not there, then it’s MBR.”
This really helped me!
I’m glad it all worked out for you.
Oh wow I hadn’t considered this would be an issue in Azure, I figured they would have some other tricks around it. I also never thought that an Azure VM disk wouldn’t be GPT. I’ve updated the post to add a note about Matt’s comment for detecting if the disk is GPT or MBR now.
Not all heroes wear capes.
Thank you!
You are very welcome. I’m glad it worked out for you.
Helped me a lot, thanks!
I’m happy I could help.
Spot on documentation! came in handy
Thank you!
Oddly I never saw the Winre.wim file in my folder – I had ‘show hidden’ selected.
Other than that everything was flawless!
Thank you for an excellent writeup 🙂
It might not have shown up because its a hidden system file and show hidden files doesn’t show hidden system files. There’s another option to enable that in the Folder View Options called Hide protected operating system files.
Thank you. I’m glad it worked.
Does this works on Windows 11 too?
Yup
Very informative and well written, thank you!
In my case I had three existing partitions on MBR disk:
1. Small System Reserved
2. OS, which I needed to expand
3. Recovery
4. Unallocated, which I wanted to be another logical drive.
I preferred deleting Recovery, then expanding the partition I wanted, and then putting back Recovery as a third partition, so it still would be a Primary one. Since the fourth (and the last for MBR due its limitations) partition would be an Extended one with a logical volume, I thought it won’t be a good idea putting the Recovery partition on it. I hope it makes sense,
Thanks!
Yes technically we are deleting it, as long as you disable the recovery partition first with the reagentc command you can delete the leftover recovery partition without issue and when you create a new recovery partition with the needed parameters then when you enable it again it will go to the new place you defined be it the middle of the disk or the end of the disk.
Looks like this will be my guide for resizing VMs going forward. Thank you for the excellent write up.
I’m honored thank you!
Awesome – probably the most useful guide I’ve read in a while
Thank you!
When you delete a partition, you should wind up with an unallocated space ( volume ) on disk… Can you explain this and how your Recovery Partition was number 4 at the beginning of your procedure?
When you run the reagentc /disable command it takes the recovery image file off of the recovery partition and places it in C:\Windows\system32\recovery because of this you can safely delete the recovery partition effectively deleting partition 4.
In the case of the example I used, I had an already existing recovery partition which was partition 4 but I wanted to add more space to my C drive. The recovery partition was in the way so I turned off the recovery partition to keep it safe then I deleted the left over unused partition 4 turning partition 4 into unallocated space again.
Then I was able to expand my C drive but I left 1gb free at the end of the disk and I recreated a recovery partition by setting the GPT id (or MBR id) . Once a recovery partition is created correctly when you run reagentc /enable the recovery file from C:\Windows\system32\recovery goes back on to the recovery partition as if nothing changed.
Your Recovery Partition was on the very left on the first screenshot and it should appear as unallocated in the exact same location after deleting it. And how did you move (C:) to the left using no third-party tool?
I replied to your other comment with more details but effectively I deleted the recovery partition then expanded my C drive but I left 1gb free when I expanded my drive so that I could turn the leftover unallocated space into a new recovery partition. The only tools used are the built in Windows tools included on all Windows systems.
Your procedure is for the most part very useful but I repeat, your pagetop screenshot shows a Recovery Partition located on the very left of disk and, since mine is located there too, I will have to use a third-pary tool move my EFI and hidden 16 MB partitions afterwards. That said, thanks a lot for your generosity. 🙂
The screenshot at the very top of this post was EFI, C drive 148gb, recovery partition 1gb, unallocated space 50gb.
I wouldn’t recommend moving your EFI partition away from the beginning of the disk that could have unintended side effects.
The end result I wanted was EFI, C drive 148gb, unallocated space 50gb, recovery partition 1gb.
To achieve this result yes you could use a third-party tool but you don’t have to.
You just need to disable the recovery partition and then delete it. This will make the disk layout be the following EFI, C drive 148gb, unallocated space 51gb
Now if you expand the C drive to eat up 50gb of that unallocated space but leave 1gb your layout will be EFI, C drive 198gb, 1gb unallocated space
Now you take that 1gb unallocated space and make it a partition. which makes the disk layout
EFI, C drive 198gb, new 1gb partition.
then if you use diskpart you can make the new 1gb partition become a recovery partition.
then when you re-enable the recovery partition the disk layout becomes EFI, C drive 198gb, recovery partition 1gb.
But yes you can use a third party program to do the same thing. I just didn’t want to. Either method you choose I wish you the best of luck with it. Please make sure you have a backup first.
Oh! EFI will not move from beginning of the disk if I decide to move my Recovery ( which comes before EFI with Retail versions of Windows ), move and resize my Recovery Partition as a fix for the KB 5034441 update that woluld not insrall normally because of insufficient size of this partition, only the Recovery one wll move. Now, I repeat again, my Recovery Partition is at the very beginning of the disk, as with any Retail version of Windows.
ohhh ok. We are same page now. Quick tip about KB5034441 I still ran into the error when my recovery was 1gb I tested it on another system and it worked by making it a total of 1.5gb.
By the way, the pagetop image of this post, I now got it, is ( involuntarily ) deceiving since EFI and OS partitions do not appear on it. But whatever, you seem to be great at IT and your post will help many so I want to says thanks again. 🙂
No problem! Thank you!
I have been lucky, it worked for me at 1 GB. Now I have a 530 MB partition at the beginning of my disk: since the 16 MB partition is not movable ( and for so it would have been be useless to move EFI even closer to the beginning of the disk ), I could not resize (C:) on the left so I created a new volume ( with no letter for the moment ), I might use it some time in the future. But anyway, my disk being 1 TB, I don’t mind much. Everything works fine on my main PC, it boots normally, I only have the living room one left to modify. Thanks again, my friend. 🙂
Nice! no problem.
Great article just what I needed!
Thanks!
THANKS!!!!!
No problem!
Unbelievably helpful. Thanks Daniel!
No problem! Happy to help.
Very good.
I did it in half a dozen PCs in my company, some UEFI, some legacy BIOS, some disks GPT some MBR, all went well.
Nice!!!!!!!!
Fantastic, thank you
Happy to help!
Excellent! Thank you so much!!!!!!
No problem!
Thanks for writing this article. I’ve just followed it but hitting problems during enabling. Looking at the logs it appears it finds issues in the REAgent.xml. I did delete the existing recovery partition and created a new (slightly larger) one near the end of the HDD
C:\Windows\System32>ReAgentc /Enable /logpath C:\Temp\Reagent.log
REAGENTC.EXE: Operation failed: b7
REAGENTC.EXE: An error has occurred.
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] Get ReAgent config
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] GetReAgentConfig Config file path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\Recovery\ReAgent.xml
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] CheckRegKey test hook (SystemSetupInProgress) present and disabled
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] Update enhanced config info is enabled.
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Warning [ReAgentc.exe] Failed to get recovery entries: 0xc0000225
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] winreGetWinReGuid returning 0X490
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] ReAgentConfig::ReadBcdAndUpdateEnhancedConfigInfo WinRE disabled, WinRE Guid could not be determined (0x490)
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] FindWinReSourceImageAndPartition No source winre.wim was specified. Checking for a staged winre.wim.
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] FindWinReSourceImageAndPartition using winre.wim from \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition3\Windows\System32\Recovery
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] –Install on target OS step 2: detect and fix if there is any issue for winre settings
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] DetectAndFixWinReIssues nothing to do because winre is not enabled.
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] –Install on target OS step 3: check if we can keep winre.wim in the same partition if it is staged.
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] CanKeepWinReOnSamePartitionIfStaged WinRE is staged. Checking that the staged partition is valid for WinRE.
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] MeetPartitionRequirements Partition details: {Offset: 344981504, Free space: 107434786816, Total space: 268935622656}
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] MeetPartitionRequirements WinRE WIM size: 1002867364
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] MeetPartitionRequirements Required free space: 356515840
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] NOTE: Find target partition: source partition will used
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] –Install on target OS step 5: set WinRE settings and restore system to a good state when hitting any errors
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] Enter SetWinRESettings
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] RegLoadKey $OFFLINE$SYSTEM failed. Error: 0x522.
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] Copying WinRE from \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition3\Windows\System32\Recovery to staging location on \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition3
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Warning [ReAgentc.exe] winreOpenOrCreateDir failed to create directory (0xb7) in file base\diagnosis\srt\reagent2\reagent\util.cpp line 1169
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Error [ReAgentc.exe] winreOpenOrCreateDir failed: 0xb7
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Warning [ReAgentc.exe] winreCopyWIM failed to create \Recovery root directory (0xb7) in file base\diagnosis\srt\reagent2\reagent\install.cpp line 1540
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Error [ReAgentc.exe] winreCopyWIM failed: 0xb7
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Warning [ReAgentc.exe] SetWinRESettings winreCopyWIM failed (0xb7) in file base\diagnosis\srt\reagent2\reagent\installex.cpp line 652
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] SetWinRESettings return with error code 0xb7
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Error [ReAgentc.exe] failed to set WinRE settings, error:0xb7
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Info [ReAgentc.exe] Exit WinReInstall return value: 0, last error: 0xb7
2024-02-09 19:13:37, Error [ReAgentc.exe] failed to install winre: : 0xb7
before you deleted the existing recovery partition did you run ReAgentc /disable ?
One of the best Windows tutorials I have ever seen! Well documented and easy to execute.
Thank you!!
May the sun shine warm upon your face. Thank you for this, saved me lots of time.
Thank you for the nice good will. Happy to help!
Outstanding tutorial! When I transferred my win11 image to new NVMe drive, I ended up with 3 Recovery partitions between unallocated space. Now have one at the end and only one data drive! Thanks a bunch!
Thank you. I’m glad it helped.
Bang-on. Clearly understandable, no fluff, no muss. EXACTLY what I needed, and now I’ve even learned a bit about the structure of partitions. (May want to swap order of the “do not assign a drive letter” and the configuration of the volume, as that’s the order they’ll happen in the real world.)
Thanks for a great tutorial!
Thank you, Happy to help!
Hello, great tutorial, and i followed it to the T, however when i finally re-enable recovery after setting the partition type to 27, REAGENTC moves the winre.wim file back to C: drive (C:\Recovery\WindowsRE folder), and not to the partition I identiified as the recovery partition. I double checked the partition type with DISKPART, and it shows 27. However if i look at the partion properties via EASEUS Partition Manager, I still see 7 as the partition type!. I rebooted the PC but still having the same results. I am really buffled with this discrepancy between DISKPART and EASEUS.
If the partition type is still 7 as indicated by EASEUS, that explains why the winre.wim is not moved there, but why is that DISKPART showing it as type 27? Any ideas what might be wrong here. Thanks
Hi Ray,
I’m not sure, I haven’t seen that before. What I would try is disabling the recovery again then redo all the steps.
I have seen recovery fail to reenable when bitlocker is on but you should get a message about that issue.
Amazing!
Thank you.
No problem.
Brazil loves you. Thank you!
Lol thank you.
You are a real life saver man. I’ve been stuck with this since yesterday and nothing worked but yr method. I’ll trash all the 3rd party progs I was forced to install in vain. Salute.
Glad I was able to help!
I had an old partition with linux on it that wasn’t working anymore. I kept trying to merge it into my main windows partition but couldn’t figure out how to do it with the recovery partition in the way. My windows partition was 2 GB away from running out of storage. I had deleted all the things I didn’t need and tried other things to save space, but it was just kicking the can further down the road. I was on the verge of buying a new laptop until I stumbled upon your post through which I was able to recovered 40 GB from the linux partition. You saved me a lot of money and hassle. Truly, thank you!
PS: Well written too! Very clear and easy to follow
oh wow! I’m glad this help save you time and money
Worked. Super helpful. The pictures were the best part. makes it easy to follow. Worked on a 2022 Server. Raid Structure.
Oh Awesome!
Hi Daniel.
I used your method successfully on a few Win 10 environments, and even on one Server 2022 environment. I will admit I missed taking notice of the step where upon running reagentc /disable, you showed the presence of the winre.wim file in the C:\Windows\System32\Recovery directory. Now, I have encountered an error with the method on another Server 2022. This time when I run the command reagentc /enable I get “REAGENTC.EXE: The Windows RE image was not found.”. In troubleshooting, I noticed the Winre.wim file was not created in the above directory. I went back to a server 2022 where I had went through the process successfully, re-ran the reagentc /disable command, and it too did not create that file. Yet, the reagentc /enable command still works just fine on it.
Could the file be saved in an alternate location? (that I can’t seem to find).
Is there any way I could extract the recovery partition (Winre.wim?) from an existing server 2022 (that was created from the same image as the one I’m having troubles with) and use it for this server I’m working on?
My current partition information:
DISKPART> list part
Partition ### Type Size Offset
————- —————- ——- ——-
Partition 1 Primary 129 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2 Primary 49 GB 666 MB
Partition 3 Primary 48 GB 49 GB
Partition 0 Extended 1537 MB 98 GB
Partition 4 Recovery 1024 MB 98 GB
Thanks ahead of time for any assistance you can provide.
Hi Serge,
Yes it should be possible to use another systems recovery image to rebuild a recovery partition you should make sure they are on the same build number (I’ve heard that maters but not sure how much it maters). I haven’t done it by copying the Winre.wim file directly from another system but in theory that should also work. Make sure you also have a backup.
Hi Daniel
This worked a treat on my virtual 2022 server, need more space on C drive.
Nice and easy to follow.
Thanks.
Mark C.
Hi Mark,
Awesome! Glad it worked.
Excellent writeup. Thanks much!
No problem! and thank you!
Gold! Pure gold! Thanks so much Daniel. Saved our @$$ on an old Server 2012 R2 VM that needed more space.
That’s awesome!! Happy to help.
Thank you so much for this – worked like a charm.
Of course, Microsoft could add this functionality into Disk Manager, but that would be helpful.
No problem. Happy to hear that.
Yeah that would be awesome if they did.