Where to find/locate WINRE.WIM?

Question

_{Wednesday, January 2, 2019 1:45 AM}

I can assign a drive letter, for example R: to my  NOT hidden Recovery Partition. I can see it thru Disk Management.msc and Diskpart.  Notice the GUID below? It denotes that this is a Microsoft Recovery partition. See here : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/winioctl/ns-winioctl-_partition_information_gpt

Notice that the information is contradictory:

it says Hidden : NO

but also says under Info that the Volume is Hidden. 

What I was trying to do was assign a drive letter R to my Recovery Partition which I can do successfully. I then went into file explorer where I can now see drive R and it says the drive/folder is empty. It obviously isn't empty. I and trying to access the Recovery Partition so that I can copy the winre.wim file to my disk where I can modify it. Like adding some batch command(.cmd) files to automate certain jobs. 

I have a brand new .iso of Windows Pro 1809 downloaded and I can mount it with poweriso and see the contents but I cannot find the winre.wim image anywhere . Can you help point out where this image file is located? Any help or appreciation will be greatly appreciated. TIA

DISKPART> select partition 5

Partition 5 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> detail partition

Partition 5

Type    : de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac

Hidden  : No

Required: Yes

Attrib  : 0X8000000000000001

Offset in Bytes: 460399312896

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info

* Volume 12                     NTFS   Partition    475 MB  Healthy    Hidden

All replies (5)

_{Wednesday, January 2, 2019 3:00 AM ✅Answered}

I found it inside install.wim using:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>DISM /Mount-Wim /WimFile:"D:\winpe\install.wim" /index:1 /MountDir:"d:\temp"

The install.wim file is found in the Installation media.

Thanks

_{Wednesday, January 2, 2019 2:21 AM}

Hi

Windows initially places the WinRE image file (winre.wim) in the Windows partition, in the \Windows\System32\Recovery folder

Hard drive partitions

When you install Windows by using Windows Setup, WinRE is configured like this:

1. During Windows Setup, Windows prepares the hard drive partitions to support WinRE.
2. Windows initially places the WinRE image file (winre.wim) in the Windows partition, in the \Windows\System32\Recovery folder.

Before delivering the PC to your customer, you can modify or replace the WinRE image file to include additional languages, drivers, or packages.

1. 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.

When you deploy Windows by applying images, you must manually configure the hard drive partitions. When WinRE is installed on a hard drive, the partition must be formatted as NTFS.

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.

We recommend that you store the recovery tools in a dedicated partition, directly after the Windows partition.

For more info about configuring hard drive partitions, see Configure UEFI/GPT-Based Hard Drive Partitions or Configure BIOS/MBR-Based Hard Drive Partitions.

Hope this helps...

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_{Wednesday, January 2, 2019 2:50 PM}

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_{Wednesday, January 2, 2019 3:34 PM}

You Question was "

Where to find/locate WINRE.WIM?.

Winpe and Winre are completely different. 

_{Tuesday, May 21, 2019 6:26 PM}

actually winpe and winre are basically the same thing. winre is built on top of winpe. winre has gui boot menu options where winpe just boots directly into the command prompt.