Microsoft tells users 'if you want to fix 0x80070643 errors, you'll have to do it yourself'

Updates released for Windows 10, Windows 11 and Windows Server back in January proved problematic for many users. There have been widespread reports of 0x80070643 errors, and Microsoft acknowledged the issue some time ago.

But for anyone holding out for a fix, there's some disappointing news. The company says that it will not be releasing a fix for the problem, but is instead expecting users to follow instructions to sort things out for themselves.

See also:

• Microsoft may have broken your VPN with Windows updates
• Windows 11 is losing market share to Windows 10
• Microsoft is optimizing Windows 10 update delivery just as it did with Windows 11

The problematic updates are the KB5034441 update for Windows 10, the KB5034440 update for Windows 11, and the KB5034439 update for Windows Server. All three are Windows Recovery Environment updates, and the problems stem from a requirement to have at least 250MB of free space in the recovery partition.

Microsoft says:

If the recovery partition does not have sufficient free space, this update will fail. In this case, you will receive the following error message:

0x80070643 - ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE

The company has provided instructions for how to manually resize your partition to avoid this error or recover from this failure. They are available here (be warned, they are quite lengthy).

Having followed these instructions, you can then install the update again.

Microsoft has, in lieu of a proper fix for the issue, published a sample script to increase the size of the WinRE recovery partition, see here.

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