A Recovery Sequel (Premium)

When I first got my Surface Laptop 7, I wasn't concerned about compatibility or performance, and I certainly wasn't worried about the security or privacy implications of Recall. But I was concerned about system recovery, the one part of the Windows 11 on Arm experience that was, at that time, still a bit dicey.

As you may know, Microsoft didn't offer an ISO download for Windows 11 on Arm, and so my options were limited. Fortunately, Microsoft does offer recovery image downloads for Surface, so I went through that rigmarole to make sure I had an out if everything went south. You have to type in your device serial number, which you can get most easily in the bundled Surface app, and then after the 3.1 GB download (for this model anyway), you have to manually create USB-based recovery media. That involves using the Recovery Drive utility built in to Windows, unzipping the recovery image download, which takes forever, and then copying the contents onto the USB-based recovery disk. Which also takes forever.

This process is also error-prone, apparently. Thanks to my fastidiousness, I didn't assume that the resulting disk would just work: Instead, I unsuccessfully rebooted my Surface Laptop using my newly created recovery disk twice before I made a version that actually worked. Once that ordeal was over, I put the disk aside and then didn't think about it again. Until I needed it for the process I described in A Recovery Story (Premium).

The good news? It worked.

Well, mostly. In the bad news department, recovery took a long time, and though I had previously upgraded this PC from Windows 11 Home to Pro, the recovery process of course put it back to Home edition. Worse, it didn't work fully: Though I was able to get the system back up, as I was reinstalling my apps, it occurred to me that I should test the on-disk Windows Recovery Environment (WRE) that had failed previously. And when I did that, it failed again, with the same blue screen. As I wrote at the time, this felt to me like a ticking time bomb. But I worked on the laptop that day and over the weekend, trying--unsuccessfully--not to think about it.

But I've been thinking about it. A lot.
❓Why did this happen?
It's impossible not to wonder what screwed up the WRE on my Surface Laptop, but I think I found the culprit. I had enrolled the PC in the Windows Insider Program's Dev channel back in November when Microsoft finally and belatedly began testing Recall (and Click to Do) there on Snapdragon X-based PCs like this one. Between then and now, I had reset the PC at least twice, I lost track. But in January, one of the builds that Microsoft issued to the Dev channel delivered an unwanted payload.

"A 0xc0e90001 error will occur when booting into Windows Recovery (WinRE) on Arm64 PCs," Microsoft wrote at the time. "This will be fixed in the next Dev Channel flight. For recovery options on your PC, visit Settings > System > Recovery."

Whether that was fixed or not is...