Samsung Magician switched position of Recovery Partition when I cloned the system from one drive to another

A little over a month ago I purchased a small mini computer. It came with two drives: an eMMC 256GB system drive and a generic 256GB NVMe SSD data drive. The SSD drive was a little small for what I wanted to do so I purchased a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB drive and cloned the system drive to it using Samsung Magician. Everything is working fine except when a look at the two drives in Disk Management, Samsung Magician switched the positions of the Recovery Partition. On the old drive it was the last partition after the C: partition. On the new drive it now exists at the beginning of the drive. When I run "reagentc", it says that the Recovery Environment is disabled.

So what is the best process to follow:
1. Does it matter if the Recovery Partition is first? If it should be last, how easy is it to switch the Recovery partition to the end?
2. If have not tried enabling the Recovery environment as I was not sure whether I wanted to try switching parttion positions. If the Recovery partition position does not matter, should I just leave the Recovery Partition where it is and enable the Recovery Environment at the first partition if it works ok there?

Also after running HWInfo64, I noticed that "Secure Boot" is not set. How do I fix that?

JohnD

Hi,
Depends on what size the RE partition is.

Yes that was a Windows 10 issue. The size of the Recovery Partition on this Windows 11 PC is a little over 9GB. I got into BIOS and found that "Secure Boot" is "Enabled" and "Secure Boot Mode" is "Standard", but Secure Boot is not active.

JohnD

johnpd said:

should I just leave the Recovery Partition where it is and enable the Recovery Environment at the first partition if it works ok there?

JohnD

Click to expand...

Yes, do that.

1. I was using Samsung Magician but didn't notice the shift issue.
2. NOT sure your PC maker, Dell or HP? on my HP PCs, when position of Recovery Partition shifted, then Recovery wouldn't work any more.
Indeed, even disk size changed on HP PCs, it wouldn't work any more. I was changing original disk from 1TB to 500GB by clone. restart and working fine. while later it's noticed, the HP PC couldn't run Recovery any more. had to replace the 1TB back. looks HP maps image by disk position in a way (HP is unique)

As I feared, enabling RE picked up the partition from the old drive. Not good.

JohnD

check the recovery partition Type guid is correct on the new disk.

free edition is fine DiskGenius Download Center | Free Download DiskGenius

rt clcik the recovery partition and select "modify partition parameters" to get the window below

The size of the Recovery Partition on this Windows 11 PC is a little over 9GB

Click to expand...

in diskgenius main window, click the recovery partition and select the Files tab
post a screenie of the contents of your 9gb recovery partition

the way to specify which partition for winre when there is more than one recovery partition:

reagentc /disable

Reagentc /setreimage /path <path_to_selected_recovery on your new disk>

reagentc /enable

Here is the image. Don't know what the ReCustomization.xml is?

It is so the option for the oem recovery shows up on the advanced startup menu.

Copy recustomization.xml to your desktop, open it in notepad and post the contents.

something like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- AddDiagnosticsToolToBootMenu.xml -->
<BootShell>
<WinRETool locale="en-us">
<Name>some name e.g. oem recovery</Name>
<Description>some description e.g. start oem recovery options</Description>
</WinRETool>
<BootShell>

it is set something like this
Reagentc /setbootshelllink /configfile <path_to_whatever.xml>

If you use diskgenius as suggested, you can copy any files out of the recovery partition.

Be interesting to see if the original winre.wim that came with the machine has sources\recovery\tools and some oem program in there

Here is the customization .xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- AddDiagnosticsToolToBootMenu.xml -->
<BootShell>
<WinRETool locale="en-us">
<Name>MeLe Fast Recovery Utility</Name>
<Description>Reset your PC and remove everything</Description>
</WinRETool>
<WinRETool locale="fr-fr">
<Name>Utilité de MeLe Fast Recovery</Name>
<Description>Dépannez votre PC de Fabrikam</Description>
</WinRETool>
</BootShell>

Thought so.

Have alook in winre.wim \sources\recovery\tools

there is probably some program in there with the winreconfig.xml

I have been doing it for years , in win7 the custom tool shows up here




in win10/11 it shows up on a little blue square

ReAgent.xml:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>

<WindowsRE version="2.0">
<WinreBCD id="{ff3032d8-73d8-11ee-b2b3-b86c49ac007b}"/>
<WinreLocation path="\Recovery\WindowsRE" id="0" offset="240334667776" guid="{e242f45f-1e0e-4722-b176-04426d55ffe1}"/>
<ImageLocation path="\Recovery\windowsre" id="0" offset="240334667776" guid="{e242f45f-1e0e-4722-b176-04426d55ffe1}"/>
<PBRImageLocation path="" id="0" offset="0" guid="{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}" index="0"/>
<PBRCustomImageLocation path="" id="0" offset="0" guid="{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}" index="0"/>
<InstallState state="1"/>
<OsInstallAvailable state="0"/>
<CustomImageAvailable state="0"/>
<IsAutoRepairOn state="1"/>
<WinREStaged state="0"/>
<OperationParam path=""/>
<OperationPermanent state="0"/>
<OsBuildVersion path="22621.1.amd64fre.ni_release.220506-1250"/>
<OemTool state="1"/>
<IsServer state="0"/>
<DownlevelWinreLocation path="" id="0" offset="0" guid="{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}"/>
<IsWimBoot state="0"/>
<NarratorScheduled state="0"/>
<ScheduledOperation state="5"/>
</WindowsRE>

johnpd said:

Yes that was a Windows 10 issue. The size of the Recovery Partition on this Windows 11 PC is a little over 9GB. I got into BIOS and found that "Secure Boot" is "Enabled" and "Secure Boot Mode" is "Standard", but Secure Boot is not active.

JohnD

Click to expand...

Hi,
That sounds like an oem manufacture recovery partition not anything microsoft made.
RE is generally max 1gb and more than not 6-800mb

Yes the original drive had the same size partition.

johnpd said:

Yes the original drive had the same size partition.

Click to expand...

Hi,
That's the real winRE then it should if enabled this is the the partition it should show using
reagentc /info
The larger partition take a combo key to engage it into resetting back to out of box.

Hi,
Think it would be wise to use a different app to clone the disk lol
Disk genus does this.

The reagentc command has an option to "setreimage" where I can point to the one I want to use. What if I tried that and point to Disk 0. I have already assigned a drive letter to that partition.

JohnD

johnpd said:

The reagentc command has an option to "setreimage" where I can point to the one I want to use. What if I tried that and point to Disk 0. I have already assigned a drive letter to that partition.

JohnD

Click to expand...

Here's some instructions

Frankly you haven't even shown a screen shot of your disk
Basically you used a crappy migration app and continue to ignore that lol