The KB5048239 update for Windows 10 fails with the 0x80070643 error, but there's a fix

Microsoft recently issued the KB5048239 for the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). Mowever many users are complaining on the Microsoft Answers forum that when they try to install it, they get the 0x80070643 error and can’t complete the operation.

It’s not the first time this happened. A similar problem occurred with the KB5034440 / KB5034441 WinRE updates which caused the 0x80070643 – ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE issue. As we reported at that moment, Microsoft decided to roll back those patches and issued the KB5042321 and KB5042320 replacements to fix the problem.

What causes the 0x80070643 error when installing KB5048239?

The problem with the this update, as with the old one, is the same: insufficient space in the system’s recovery partition which requires at least 250 MB of space. The solution, in this case, is to resize the WinRE partition, but it’s not that simple for the average user, so people are rightfully disgruntled about this problem.

However, some users reported on the same forum thread that they managed to go around this issue by simply installing the other available updates from the list, and after restarting their PCs, the issue was gone.

Also, it’s important to know that Microsoft knows about this problem and has issued a guide on how to fix the problem by resizing the partition and they also provided a script that will perform this action faster.

We also need to mention that the WinRE is not a critical update and it’s not necessary for all the systems.

If you still have issues installing KB5048239, let us know in the comments below.