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I'm trying to mirror Windows volume between two disks, but it won't let me convert disks to dynamic until I delete Recovery partition.

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt




Disk 0    Online           40 GB  1024 KB
  Disk 1    Online           40 GB    39 GB


DISKPART> select disk 0


Disk 0 is now the selected disk.


DISKPART> list partition


Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset




Partition 1    Primary            100 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    Primary             39 GB   101 MB
  Partition 3    Recovery           724 MB    39 GB


DISKPART> convert dynamic


Virtual Disk Service error:
There is not enough usable space for this operation.

This works fine with GPT, but with MBR There is not enough usable space for this operation. Which is a lie, because I reinstalled Windows with 1GB unallocated space at the end, and it didn't help:

Same error with 1GB of unallocated space at the end

Then I tried the solution from here:

  1. Capture the image of Recovery partition with dism
  2. Disable ReAgentC with reagentc /disable
  3. Delete Recovery partition
  4. Convert disks to dynamic and create my mirror
  5. Create a simple volume for Recovery, format as NTFS, assign letter R
  6. Apply Recovery image to new volume with dism
  7. Set the new location of WinRE with reagentc /setreimage /path R:\Recovery\WindowsRE
  8. Enable ReAgentC with reagentc /enable

Last two steps is where I get a new problem:

>reagentc /setreimage /path R:\Recovery\WindowsRE
Directory set to:

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.


>reagentc /enable
REAGENTC.EXE: The Windows RE image was not found.

Here is dir of R:\Recovery\WindowsRE to confirm that it has Winre.wim:

>dir R:\Recovery\WindowsRE /a

Directory of R:\Recovery\WindowsRE


10/17/2024  12:31 AM    <DIR>          .
10/17/2024  10:31 AM    <DIR>          ..
05/08/2021  01:14 AM         3,170,304 boot.sdi
10/17/2024  12:31 AM             1,117 ReAgent.xml
09/05/2024  03:54 PM       618,384,178 Winre.wim
               3 File(s)    621,555,599 bytes
               2 Dir(s)     121,339,904 bytes free

So the question is, is it possible to mirror Windows volume and have Recovery partition as well?

therapist
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1 Answers1

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Decided to post an answer myself since I did figure this out. Maybe helps someone out in the future.

The steps to recreate Windows RE partition were almost complete, all I had to do is retain the Recovery volume in diskpart between steps 6 and 7. Also dism was not required, I used xcopy command instead from this doc.

The retain command "Prepares an existing simple dynamic volume for use as a boot or system volume". No wonder it didn't work before.

After that, reagentc /setreimage ... and reagentc /enable worked as expected, and I was able to boot into Windows RE without any problem.

therapist
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