I recently came across a Windows 10 upgrade that seems to fail when the recovery partition is too small. Ironically, Windows itself reports a "Download error", however, searching the internet suggested enlarging the recovery partition solves the problem, which it indeed did on one of my computers.
However, we run dozens of Windows computers, that are geographically dispersed. So, gaining physical access, booting into a live-Linux to resize partitions isn't all that practical. The manual resizing is made more of a hassle since the machines are generally Bitlocker encrypted, which means extra steps.
Has Windows a mechanism to resolve the issue (when the recovery partition is indeed too small), or is manual intervention the only way forward? Are my machines doomed to remain un-updated until Microsoft delivers "smaller" updates or someone manually touches the partitions?
A further note:
The offending update is indeed KB5034441, as Ramhound suggested in the comments: KB5034441, so I guess the issue will be taken care of by Microsoft at some point.
Searching the internet did not lead me to the linked support article, but various other comments elsewhere pointed out that the size of the recovery partition is to blame.
Interestingly, German-language Windows reports a "download error", which is not very informative.
Anyway, since the size of the recovery partition may make or break an update, and size requirements in software generally trend upwards, I think my original question still remains somewhat in place.
Is there an automatic way for Windows to increase the size of its recovery partition, if such an enlargement becomes critical for receiving further updates?
Updated to add
After some searching for an official recommendation for the minimum size of the recovery partition, I found this from Microsoft, I quote (copy&paste):
Recovery tools partition
This partition must be at least 300 MB.
...
The recovery tools should be in a separate partition than the Windows partition to support automatic failover and to support booting partitions encrypted with Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption.
We recommend that you place this partition immediately after the Windows partition. This allows Windows to modify and recreate the partition later if future updates require a larger recovery image.
So, Microsoft themselves insinuate that there might be the possibility of an automatic (possibly) resizing of the recovery partition.
Am I reading this right?
I would very much prefer a Windows, which enlarges the recovery partition by itself if it senses that the small size of the recovery partition prevents Windows from being updated.
Updated to add 2
I have now "processed" a second machine. By opening the "Computer Management" as an Administrator, I could resize the system partition of Windows within Windows itself, without even the need to touch Bitlocker. I am somewhat impressed, nice done Microsoft.
However, I still needed to boot into a live USB-Linux to resize the recovery partition. That's odd: Windows can resize its own system partition, but not its recovery partition?
Anyway, now the recovery partition is more than 2 GB, but the update still fails with the same "download error".
So, on one machine manually enlarging the recovery partition enabled to update to install. On the other machine, manual recovery partition enlargement still did not fix the issue with the update.
Updated to add: Microsoft won't fix this issue, as per theRegister
