Haha! Yes, this was a mess!<p>I was called to help my concerned stepson with "an update error" this past weekend. I'm a software engineer but even I kind of balked at it at first, realizing how very easily an on-the-fly resizing of partitions can go wrong!<p>Let's take it from the beginning.<p>He pointed me to the "out of disk space" error code, which isn't in text form to begin with, but only something you find out by googling it. I thought that must be wrong, because the drive is like 30% full. Knowing how this particular error is sometimes thrown inaccurately, I dug deeper and ended up in a long winded forum thread about all sorts of people and skill levels having issues. Novice home users. Advanced users. SERVER ADMINS.<p>It soon dawned upon me that the disk space error was correct; it was only talking about it from the perspective of a tiny Windows Recovery Environment partition! Or "tiny"... It was like 300 MB large but not enough. It wanted something like another 500 MB now.<p>People yelled at MS for not pulling the patch and fixing it or bringing an automated post-patch fix.<p>BUT if this HAS to be done, MS is in a tough spot now. Because it's inadvisible to resize partitions automatically. You usually want backups as it's a high risk operation where power loss or bad input will brick the OS install. I also think how and if it can be resized depends on the layout on the partition table. For example, I had to reduce the end of a former partition to increase the start of the recovery one. Fortunately, I had free space there. I can imagine a Microsoft script wizard would have his heart sink as he'd ship an automated partition resizing script to millions of systems and all their intricacies.<p>So, I'm not sure how MS will end up fixing this to be honest. My only "fix" would be to rewrite the code so that it don't need a larger Windows RE partition anymore?? OR simply not installing this patch if it's too small. Otherwise, this can only really be "safely" fixed as part of a fresh Windows install with hard drive reformatting and the whole shebang.<p>I ended up fixing it with a free partition resize tool (MiniTool Partition Wizard). MS advised me to the command line but to hell with that and their ancient DISKPART.EXE and having to input the correct partition # for your partitions when there were like five of them on the drive. I needed something more visual as assistance to hand hold me from making mistakes.<p>But how on Earth could this even happen? Did MS just kind of forget that they have had previous, smaller Windows RE requirements in the past?