Windows update (KB5034441) Error (0x80070643)

By the sounds of all the complaints seeming to come from OEM installs of windows, I'm betting it might have something to do with it. I have a couple of Dell Alienware R5's I was having issues with, and directly after reinitializing the WinRE partition from scratch, rebooting and having the update fail again, I tried a sfc /scannow. Believe it or not, it found ((something)), and after another reboot, the update actually went though.

obviously, plenty of people have tried plenty of things, and if you followed the list- you likely have already tried this. Or maybe you're like me, and just hate having to babysit a system file checker for a clean install, and thought it futile to try.

I realize that, and the 2 laptops I've had this issue with, have a Windows RE partition. I think I'm more in shock that a Windows update is attempting to touch it, without notifying the users or admins of the machines. The two happen to be OEM, Alienware's from Dell, and they both more than met the RE partition size requirement (we have them set to 2gig). They were both fresh re-installs (direct from Media Creation Kit via USB).

Oddly enough, running a sfc /scannow found something, and upon reboot, the update went through without any hiccups. sfc is almost always my last ditch effort because it doesn't really tell us what went wrong in most cases and just takes bloody forever 😉. (If someone knows of a logfile, I'd love the info. I've never located one short of the SR tags in the cbs.log. and they aren't exactly forthcoming, just that a problem was detected and repaired)

If anyone else happens to see this down the line, and run into the same issue with an OEM Dell Alienware (ours are R5), give the sfc a shot after you resize.

Mine showed a size of 536MB after getting reagentc enabled. The actions recommended in this post do work, they did for eight PC's I have fixed. Both MBR and GPT drives. The MBR drives do take some patience and sometimes some help from Partition Managers to get them resized, created, ID set, and reagentc working and enabled. If you are good with the Command Line, reagentc, shrinking, creating partitions, and following directions you can do this all on your own. If your are not so good at using these, find someone who is. Microsoft may not be able to fix this problem for everyone out there, just too many variables.

once you have the new recovery partition, if you check the size in Disk Management, it is EMPTY, nothing stored there.

Not really. Disk management is blind to the used space of a protected partition. It's always reporting 100 % free, before as well as after.

But the partition is actually empty with Windows RE disabled.