Built a self-healing WinRE manager for Windows 11 — sharing the failure modes and what I learned about the recovery partition lifecycle

ArthurDurand said:

I desinged my project with this philosophy:
1. Never break Windows RE.

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Quandary said:

Well something needs to be tweaked as my newly created Windows RE is broken. The Repair process appeared to have run normally on my ASUS Zenbook. Then when booting into the RE environment the normal window opens but it has no access to my internal drive. It is possible that some drivers are needed and were not included. The log file is attached. I restored the Recovery partition from a Hasleo image backup and that RE can see my internal drives. Hope there is update or process that need to run before the Repair.

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Confirmed — this is a real failure of the repair, not a normal outcome. The log shows that the Intel storage driver (iastorvd.inf) was present in the WIM the repair started from, was removed by the strip stage, and was not re-injected because the manager's VMD hardware detection reported no matching devices on your machine. The result is a WinRE that boots but cannot see the internal drive. Your Hasleo restore fixed it because the pre-repair image still had the driver.

To fix this I need three things from that machine, if you can get them:

1. Get-PnpDevice -PresentOnly | Where-Object { $_.InstanceId -match 'VEN_8086' -and $_.Class -in @('SCSIAdapter','System') } | Select-Object InstanceId, Class, FriendlyName — the actual device IDs of the storage controller.
2. Whether Intel VMD is enabled or disabled in the BIOS on that machine.
3. The output of reagentc /info and the state of the recovery partition before you restored it — specifically the Deployed WinRE metadata: 10.0.26100.9168|9168 state file, if you still have it.

Once I have the device IDs, I can add the matching pattern to the manifest so the manager resolves the right driver on that model. This is a fix I'll ship as its own patch, not as a documentation correction.

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Quandary said:

1.
Get-PnpDevice -PresentOnly | Where-Object { $_.InstanceId -match 'VEN_8086' -and $_.Class -in @('SCSIAdapter','System') } | Select-Object InstanceId, Class, FriendlyName

InstanceId Class FriendlyName
---------- ----- ------------
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E79&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&A9 System Intel(R) Seria...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E4C&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&40 System Intel(R) GNA S...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7D0B&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_00\3&11583659&0&70 SCSIAdapter Intel RST VMD ...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E23&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&FD System Intel(R) SPI -...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E7F&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&A2 System Intel(R) Share...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E45&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&90 System Intel(R) Integ...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E28&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&FB System Intel® Smart S...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E70&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&B0 System Intel(R) Manag...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E78&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&A8 System Intel(R) Seria...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E25&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&F0 System Intel(R) Seria...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7EC5&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_10\3&11583659&0&39 System PCI Express Ro...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E22&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&FC System Intel(R) SMBus...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7D0D&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_01\3&11583659&0&50 System Intel(R) Platf...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E30&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&F3 System Intel(R) Seria...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7E02&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_20\3&11583659&0&F8 System PCI standard I...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7EC4&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_10\3&11583659&0&38 System PCI Express Ro...
INTELAUDIO\DSP_CTLR_DEV_7E28&VEN_8086&DEV_0222&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_0020\4&2793FD0D&0&0800 System Intel® Smart S...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7D03&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_04\3&11583659&0&20 System Intel(R) Innov...
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7D14&SUBSYS_1A631043&REV_04\3&11583659&0&00

2. VMD Controller is Enabled and Intel VIrtualization Technology is Enabled.

3.
reagentc /info
Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration
Information:

Windows RE status: Enabled
Windows RE location: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition4\Recovery\WindowsRE
Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: 100e85f7-c29b-11f1-9d43-546ceb959f42
Recovery image location:
Recovery image index: 0
Custom image location:
Custom image index: 0
Windows RE Version: 10.0.26100.9545

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

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