Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

As daunting as the fix seems, I appreciate them offering any at all; couple years ago when an update broke ReFS arrays for more than a handful of people, we were never given a solution beyond rolling back, until the update eventually became required and uninstallable, necessitating rebuilding the array from scratch

I followed the instructions to disable the recovery partition as I don't think I had allocated any space to it and upon reboot I was able to upgrade to Windows 11 and hopefully I didn't create any further problems down the road. I really didn't want to mess around with resizing my system partition as the instructions alluded to as the next step. I guess YMMV but I find it amusing that this random bug I ran into is on the front page or Hacker news.

IIRC WinRE asks for a local administrator password before doing any recovery operations, no? Also, this is one of the reasons why "auto unlock" is generally a huge asterisk and PIN/password/network unlock are recommended instead, if possible. (Though they do force you to be a laptop nanny during update times and unlock it on every restart...)

Haha! Yes, this was a mess!

I was called to help my concerned stepson with "an update error" this past weekend. I'm a software engineer but even I kind of balked at it at first, realizing how very easily an on-the-fly resizing of partitions can go wrong!

Let's take it from the beginning.

He pointed me to the "out of disk space" error code, which isn't in text form to begin with, but only something you find out by googling it. I thought that must be wrong, because the drive is like 30% full. Knowing how this particular error is sometimes thrown inaccurately, I dug deeper and ended up in a long winded forum thread about all sorts of people and skill levels having issues. Novice home users. Advanced users. SERVER ADMINS.

It soon dawned upon me that the disk space error was correct; it was only talking about it from the perspective of a tiny Windows Recovery Environment partition! Or "tiny"... It was like 300 MB large but not enough. It wanted something like another 500 MB now.

People yelled at MS for not pulling the patch and fixing it or bringing an automated post-patch fix.

BUT if this HAS to be done, MS is in a tough spot now. Because it's inadvisible to resize partitions automatically. You usually want backups as it's a high risk operation where power loss or bad input will brick the OS install. I also think how and if it can be resized depends on the layout on the partition table. For example, I had to reduce the end of a former partition to increase the start of the recovery one. Fortunately, I had free space there. I can imagine a Microsoft script wizard would have his heart sink as he'd ship an automated partition resizing script to millions of systems and all their intricacies.

So, I'm not sure how MS will end up fixing this to be honest. My only "fix" would be to rewrite the code so that it don't need a larger Windows RE partition anymore?? OR simply not installing this patch if it's too small. Otherwise, this can only really be "safely" fixed as part of a fresh Windows install with hard drive reformatting and the whole shebang.

I ended up fixing it with a free partition resize tool (MiniTool Partition Wizard). MS advised me to the command line but to hell with that and their ancient DISKPART.EXE and having to input the correct partition # for your partitions when there were like five of them on the drive. I needed something more visual as assistance to hand hold me from making mistakes.

But how on Earth could this even happen? Did MS just kind of forget that they have had previous, smaller Windows RE requirements in the past?

Home can read/write previously created Bitlocker protected drives. On systems that have proper modern standby/tpm (mainly laptops) it also supports whole disk encryption.