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May 26th, 2020 07:00
Panther add ons?
Does any one know what the panther add ons might be in the recovery partition. My recovery partition was lost, and I recently managed to rebuilt most of it myself, but with a reset, I always get the "Failed to apply the Panther Add on files/directories" (something like that) error in the logs file. I noticed it looks for a panther directory, along with some add ons, might be a .wim file or another directory.
Also, could anyone could give me a list of the names of all the files that are in their recovery partition? I know the original recovery files are not that important, however; I prefer customizing it, and prefer rebuilding certain files myself to avoid errors.


jphughan
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May 26th, 2020 08:00
@shortydogg Panther likely refers to a folder that sometimes exists as a subfolder of \Windows\System32\Sysprep, so something in your rebuild process might be calling that location expecting to find something there. But are you talking about the regular Windows Recovery partition, i.e WinRE, not some Dell factory image restore partition? If so, my WinRE partition contains a folder structure of \Recovery\WindowsRE. In there the only files are boot.sdi, Reagent.xml, and Winre.wim. These files are typically set up during the Windows Setup process, although working with the ReagentC utility can cause them to be moved around. The Winre.wim file itself has to exist (a default Windows image has it under \Windows\System32\Recovery initially) and then if you use ReagentC to designate a different Recovery location, it moves Winre.wim over to that location and generates those other two files.
Also be aware that new Windows 10 feature releases update the Recovery partition, or will create one if it doesn't already exist, which might affect your customizations. You might want to consider keeping whatever customized recovery boot environment you want to use on a separate flash drive just to insulate it from whatever Windows does to its own Winre.wim file. I realize that's not quite a convenient, but you'll likely find it's more reliable.
But if you just want to get back to a Winre.wim baseline, that shouldn't have required a rebuild effort. You can just mount the install.wim or install.esd file from regular Windows 10 install media, then browse to \Windows\System32\Recovery, and the default Winre.wim file for that Windows 10 release will be there.
shortydogg
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May 26th, 2020 09:00
Thanks for the response, but I was referring to the original Dell Factory Recovery Partition. I wanted to rebuild and customize it myself so that a reset will not give me any errors. I already have:
winre.wim, install.swm, install2.swm, install3.swm, diskpart.txt, and a few others. I rebuilt those myself. I also added the panther directory from Windows\System32, but the log file in OEM\Recovery is also looking for some other Panther Add on files that I have know idea what they are. That's why I need a list of the names of the original files that came with that recovery partition.
I already know the winre file and partitions pretty well, but thanks for the response.
jphughan
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May 26th, 2020 10:00
@shortydogg Ok, can't help you with Dell's tools. Out of curiosity though, if you're capable enough to do this sort of thing, why do you even care about having a factory restore image available at all? Chances are that even IF you ever need to use it, by that point it will be very outdated, so you'll need to update to a new Windows 10 release and install a bunch of driver and application updates -- to the point that it might have ended up being faster to just perform a clean install using the latest version of Windows 10 and the latest drivers and app versions in the first place. And that doesn't even consider whether the time you're spending "fixing" this will ever be recovered in time saved later on -- which seems unlikely too.