Microsoft could have made the winre file smaller on the Recovery partition.

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[OldGuyForum]

One way is converting it from .wim to .esd file format.

The Windows installer file came in two flavors, .wim and .esd…so it was either install.wim or install.esd in the sources folder.

For an experiment, I copied winre.wim off my recovery partition and converted it.

DISM/Export-Image /SourceImageFile:”C:\Test\winre.wim” /SourceIndex:1 /DestinationImageFile:”C:\Test\winre.esd” /Compress:recovery /CheckIntegrity

winre.wim – 528 MB

winre.esd – 324 MB

May not have made a difference for the partition resizing fiasco, and probably would have required Microsoft to change their winre updating and access strategy…but just sayin’.

• This topic was modified 10 months, 1 week ago by OldGuyForum.

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That may not work since the command “bcdedit /enum ALL” shows that “Winre.wim” is specifically referenced as a ramdisk for loading the “Windows Recovery Environment”:

Windows Boot Loader
——————-
identifier {9f0a4da7-c4b9-11ee-890a-64315017406b}
device ramdisk=[\Device\HarddiskVolume3]\Recovery\WindowsRE\Winre.wim,{9f0a4da8-c4b9-11ee-890a-64315017406b}
path \windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows Recovery Environment
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
displaymessage Recovery
osdevice ramdisk=[\Device\HarddiskVolume3]\Recovery\WindowsRE\Winre.wim,{9f0a4da8-c4b9-11ee-890a-64315017406b}
systemroot \windows
nx OptIn
bootmenupolicy Standard
winpe Yes

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EyesOnWindows wrote:

That may not work since the command “bcdedit /enum ALL” shows that “Winre.wim” is specifically referenced as a ramdisk for loading the “Windows Recovery Environment”:

OldGuyForum wrote:

probably would have required Microsoft to change their winre updating and access strategy

AFAIK, a .esd file can’t be mounted…so I’m not sure how install.esd was handled by setup.exe when doing Windows in-place upgrades.

A .wim file can be converted to a .VHDX file, but then the size becomes an issue again.

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Boot.wim is the one that gets mounted to do the WinPE boot, so install.esd can be read by setup.exe once that loads.

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steeviebops wrote:

Boot.wim is the one that gets mounted to do the WinPE boot

Nope.  WinRE.wim is the file that gets mounted as a virtual drive.  That is what allows WinRE to work on the OS drive, because it’s doing it from the virtual drive in RAM, not the HDD or SSD.

Boot.sdi does the mounting and assigns drive letter X:

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

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which almost all of this is pointless or worthless as it’s NOT that simple by Microsoft’s own standards, imo

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bbearren wrote:

Nope. WinRE.wim is the file that gets mounted as a virtual drive. That is what allows WinRE to work on the OS drive, because it’s doing it from the virtual drive in RAM, not the HDD or SSD. Boot.sdi does the mounting and assigns drive letter X:

@steeviebops was referring to how install.esd is handled for Windows in-place upgrades.

 

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EP wrote:

as it’s NOT that simple by Microsoft’s own standards

Microsoft apparently can do “NOT that simple”…(Windows, .NET, SQL Server, Azure, et. al.)

They should be able to figure out how to fix a defect without causing users to change their partition size.

 

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