Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) is a recovery environment that can repair common causes of unbootable operating systems. WinRE is based on Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE), and can be customized with additional drivers, languages, Windows PE Optional Components, and other troubleshooting and diagnostic tools. By default, WinRE is preloaded into the Windows 10 and Windows 11 for desktop editions (Home, Pro, Enterprise, and Education) and Windows Server 2016, and later, installations.
After any of these actions is performed, all user sessions are signed off and the Advanced startup menu is displayed. If your users select a WinRE feature from this menu, the PC restarts into WinRE and the selected feature is launched.
You can add one custom tool to the Advanced startup menu. Otherwise, these menus can't be further customized. For more info, see Add a Custom Tool to the Windows RE Advanced startup Menu.
You can customize WinRE by adding packages (Windows PE Optional Components), languages, drivers, and custom diagnostic or troubleshooting tools. The base WinRE image includes these Windows PE Optional Components:
The number of packages, languages, and drivers is limited by the amount of memory available on the PC. For performance reasons, minimize the number of languages, drivers, and tools that you add to the image.
During the specialize configuration pass, the WinRE image file is copied into the recovery tools partition, so that the device can boot to the recovery tools even if there's a problem with the Windows partition.
Add the baseline WinRE tools image (winre.wim) to a separate partition from the Windows and data partitions. This enables your users to use WinRE even if the Windows partition is encrypted with Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption. It also prevents your users from accidentally modifying or removing the WinRE tools.
Store the recovery tools in a dedicated partition, directly after the Windows partition. This way, if future updates require a larger recovery partition, Windows will be able to handle it more efficiently by adjusting the Windows and recovery partition sizes, rather than having to create a new recovery partition size while the old one remains in place.
In order to boot Windows RE directly from memory (also known as RAM disk boot), a contiguous portion of physical memory (RAM) which can hold the entire Windows RE image (winre.wim) must be available. To optimize memory use, manufacturers should ensure that their firmware reserves memory locations either at the beginning or at the end of the physical memory address space.
Unlike the normal OS update process, updates for Windows RE don't directly service the on-disk Windows RE image (winre.wim). Instead, a newer version of the Windows RE image replaces the existing one, with the following contents being injected or migrated into the new image:
The Windows RE update process makes every effort to reuse the existing Windows RE partition without any modification. However, in some rare situations where the new Windows RE image (along with the migrated/injected contents) does not fit in the existing Windows RE partition, the update process will behave as follows:
To ensure that your customizations continue to work after Windows RE has been updated, they must not depend on functionalities provided by Windows PE optional components which are not in the default Windows RE image (e.g. WinPE-NetFX). To facilitate development of Windows RE customizations, the WinPE-HTA optional component has been added to the default Windows RE image in Windows 10.
The new Windows RE image deployed as part of the rollup update contains language resources only for the system default language, even if the existing Windows RE image contains resources for multiple languages. On most PCs, the system default language is the language selected at the time of OOBE.
This is a known issue and the workaround is to either avoid setting the "Accounts: Block Microsoft accounts" to "User can't add or log with Microsoft Account" or set the MDM policy Security/RecoveryEnvironmentAuthentication to 2.
Went to create a recovery USB drive on windows 11. After a while I was prompted to insert a USB drive of at least 32GB which I duly did but the "next" button stayed greyed out. After checking my USB drive I can see that there is actually only 28.8Gb available. Just to be sure I formatted it again and it stayed at 28.8GB. I checked a few other USB sticks I had lying around and they all seem to have capacity less than advertised (16GB is actually 14.7 etc).
I may have missed something else but the (real) capacity of 28.8GB seems to be what is stopping me from proceeding. I am sure that the good people of Microsoft know about USB drive capacities. Did they really mean us to get 64GB USB sticks to create recovery drives?
It appears that the issue you're encountering is a common one related to the way storage devices are marketed versus how operating systems calculate storage space.
Manufacturers often advertise storage capacity based on the assumption that 1GB equals 1 billion bytes. However, operating systems like Windows calculate 1GB as 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024^3 bytes), resulting in a lower displayed capacity.
For creating a Windows 11 recovery drive, a USB drive with a minimum capacity of 32GB is required. If your 32GB USB drive is showing only 28.8GB of available space, it may not be recognized by the recovery tool.
Here are some suggestions:
2. Use Disk Management or DiskPart: These built-in Windows tools can help delete all partitions on the USB drive and create a new single partition that utilizes the full capacity.
Yesterday, I turned on my computer and it directly took me to Windows Recovery Environment which means that Windows 11 didn't load normally. I turned off the computer and tried to restart but came to the same place, Win RE. Then I moved forward with the options I had. Options were: Use a Device, Troubleshoot, and Turn off your PC. I clicked on Use a device and it gave me only one option which was EFI USB Device. I clicked on it, and it gave me an error after a few seconds of some process going in the background: The selected boot device failed. Press to Continue. Then, I press enter and come back to the same WinRE place where it started.
Then I choose the Troubleshoot option and I get 6 more options: Startup repair, Command Prompt, Uninstall Updates, UEFI Firmware Settings, System Restore, and System Image Recovery. I click on Startup Repair, and it asks me for some Bitlocker key. I go to the website shown on screen and find the recovery key and enter it and continue. Then startup repair starts and then gives me an error that it couldn't repair the pc and go back to the advanced options. I know that this problem isn't because of an update because the last update I made was Preview Build 22631.2262 on August 24th, and it made no sense to uninstall the update because it had some great fixes to some problems. I couldn't do anything with system restore or system image recovery because I had nothing for that. I know nothing related to CMD in WinRE, but I did notice one thing that the path showing started with "X:" drive rather than "C:" drive. It is strange because I have not created any kind of X: in my laptop with the partition stuff. And there is nothing I could do with UEFI because this a brand-new laptop (5 months old) and I have never touched the UEFI stuff. I did try to do some system diagnostics and system component tests, but everything was good to go and gave me no errors.
This problem cannot allow me to boot normally into Windows 11 and it doesn't let me use my computer. This really is a high priority issue that I have got for the first time in the lifetime of using Windows OSs. There are no logs or kind of data that I can attach since I am using another laptop for submitting this question or feedback.
If your HP Spectre x360 16-inch laptop is stuck at the Windows Recovery Environment screen, it's likely that your operating system is encountering some issues. Here are some steps you can take to try and resolve the problem.
Safe Mode: If a normal restart doesn't work, try booting into Safe Mode. This will load a minimal set of drivers and may allow you to access your system to troubleshoot further. To boot into Safe Mode, follow these steps:
System Restore: If you can access Safe Mode, try performing a system restore to a point in time when your computer was working correctly. This can often resolve software-related issues. To do this:
Windows Repair or Reinstall: If none of the above steps work, you might need to repair or reinstall Windows. You can do this from the Windows Recovery Environment, but it's a more advanced step. Make sure you have backup copies of your important data before attempting this.
So far, we have tried everything from the basics like a normal restart or safe mode boot or system restore or system image recovery or startup repair, but everything was in vain. Nothing worked. I try to restart normally, and it still come to the same WinRE Environment. Yes, that is correct, and you read it right. Once the BIOS has done its processing, the Windows 11 OS will directly take me to the WinRE Environment. It won't even give me any option to boot normally or boot into any kind of safe mode. Just straight to the WinRE Environment. In WinRE, I can access command prompt with very minimal scope, and it isn't the normal command prompt or something like it has very few features than the normal WinRE command prompt. We tried bcdedit and bootrec /rebuild, but it always gave us errors of some kind. We tried sfc /scannow, dism.exe commands, chkdsk /f, and much more but it did nothing. It looked like something was blocking all those commands. It was like something above the administrator was blocking it which could be the system code itself or maybe something else. Every time when pc turns on and take me straight to WinRE, it would ask for a keyboard layout and then give me 3 options (troubleshoot, turn off pc, and choose a device for boot load I guess). Within the choose a device option, there is nothing. Empty. So, we go back to main menu and then troubleshoot. Troubleshoot has 6 options: startup repair, command prompt, uninstall updates, uefi firmware settings, system restore, and system image recovery.
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