Windows 10 failed to install an update - Error 0x80070643 (2024)

I know from web searching that the error message 0x80070643 relates to a lack of space, specifically in the recovery environment partition. And that I should expand that partition by about 250MB or so. Easy enough, I says.

I, uh, don't see one. In Disk Management I can see a rather large 664MB partition on the system drive but it doesn't have the Recovery Partition label, I can't "explore" it, and one doesn't show up in the Volume column.

Following the usual advice I ran cmd as admin and got this back:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>reagentc /infoWindows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configurationInformation: Windows RE status: Enabled Windows RE location: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk1\partition4\Recovery\WindowsRE Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: 4d18a24a-f493-11ea-8d30-e0d4e83818c2 Recovery image location: Recovery image index: 0 Custom image location: Custom image index: 0REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

No recovery images found, but Windows RE enabled, and it says the location is Disk 1 and Partition 4. I don't see a partition 4.

So am I doing something wrong or did Windows sh*t the bed on the recovery partition?

I'm wondering if it was the KB5034441 update which has run into free space issues for lots of installs. Microsoft has instructions and also a script to do the resize which might help:

I have the same issue, but haven't tried to resize the partition since I'm not using Bitlocker.

dangle said:

I have the same issue, but haven't tried to resize the partition since I'm not using Bitlocker.

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Same here. That update has been failing every month since January on my win 10 box. Also not using bitlocker, so... not going to get too upset over it.

However, I'm seeing a healthy recovery partition in disk management.

The "recovery image location" is normally blank and the index is 0 because you're using the standard recovery image built into Windows. This is not the recovery ENVIRONMENT's location. The RE is just the thing that runs "automatic repair" or lets you run System Restore or bring up a command prompt to perform repairs when Windows won't boot. If an OEM or you had created a non-default Windows image to use to reset the PC to factory default, it could be registered and would be shown in the "recovery image location". (No idea why there is a separate entry for "custom".)

The partition numbers are correct. You'll notice in Disk Management that your EFI partition is listed as number 2, even though it seems to be the first partition. This is because DM doesn't display the "reserved" partition. This is an empty, unformatted partition created during a clean install that Microsoft added but has never actually used for anything (and which Windows works fine without). If you use another partition manager like AOMEI Partition Assistant, you can see it. I suppose they anticipated this being such an important volume that they didn't want DM to even show it existed, similar to how DM doesn't allow you to do certain things which you need to do with diskpart.

Resizing doesn't seem to be the real fix for this. My partition is 1.95GB, and I recreated it when the issue first came up (it was actually broken) even though I don't use Bitlocker just because I don't want an error coming up every time updates run. It continues to throw this error on updates for KB5034441. I think the developers don't actually have any idea why it happens, and threw out the partition size bullsh*t to blame the customers and their machines and gain time to figure it out, but it's been months. They've needed to resize that partition during updates in the past and it worked fine, which is why I moved my recovery partition in front of the C drive and made it very large, because I got tired of them resizing my partitions without asking and making them odd sizes. It's ridiculous that they just decided to say they can't fix it themselves and tossed it back onto customers to resolve with such complicated and dangerous tools, with instructions that depend on you having a completely default configuration. So it's possible that resizing won't even fix the issue for you.

It's possible that the recovery partition ID has been lost on yours and that's why it doesn't show in DM with the right label. It probably still WORKS just fine (and you can test it with the Advanced Startup feature). But since you want to try resizing I'd just say wipe it and recreate it from scratch. Just delete the partition, shrink the C drive a bit, then recreate the partition with all the free space.

(highest scored answer here) https://superuser.com/questions/1667319/how-to-restore-the-recovery-partition-in-windows-10

I know of fresh installs that still have the issue. Doesn't always fix it.

Wheels Of Confusion said:

So 1) it's not just me, and 2) following the steps probably won't stop it, and 3) are all of us having the problem because we don't use Bitlocker?

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The fault is not related to whether you do or don't use BitLocker. It's just that the update is only really necessary if you DO use BitLocker, as it fixes a vulnerability involving BitLocker. There seems to be nothing that anyone can identify that will tell you if it's going to work properly on any particular machine, but the only people for whom it is a critical fix are the ones that use BitLocker (and really only the ones whose environment exposes the machine to the vulnerability, so it's a tiny fraction of people using Windows overall).

The update patches code in the recovery environment; it's basically a new version. It's possible to install the updated recovery environment code manually (I forget exactly how; I think there's a manual KB install), so that you are protected from the vulnerability if you enable BitLocker, however Windows still won't recognize this patch via Windows Update as being installed and will continue showing an error until Microsoft actually fixes whatever the issue is.

Kaiser Sosei said:

I know of fresh installs that still have the issue. Doesn't always fix it.

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I would hope that the latest media creation build should have it already built in. Hopefully. If not, I would just leave it alone for now until Microsoft fixes the update.

Lord Evermore said:

There seems to be nothing that anyone can identify that will tell you if it's going to work properly on any particular machine, but the only people for whom it is a critical fix are the ones that use BitLocker

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I see numerous errors a day from several machines, complaining about retrim failures, on machines that don't have an SSD. Appears to be a years-old issue Microsoft just hasn't bothered to fix, because the error boils down to "this machine has spinning rust" and doesn't affect anything else. Par for the course, then.