First look: Windows 11 Quick Machine Recovery

August 7, 2025 Yanac

A noteworthy new feature is starting to make its way into Windows 11 machines. Called Quick Machine Recovery (QMR), it offers novel, interesting, and possibly OS-saving capabilities.

Announced last November at Microsoft Ignite 2024 in Chicago, QMR began trickling into Beta and Dev Channel Insider Preview releases in March 2025 or thereabouts. In July 2025, it went into gradual rollout for Windows 11 24H2 production releases (Build 26100.4652 and higher).

Given the time it takes for a gradual rollout to cover all bases — usually 90 to 120 days — QMR is unlikely become a truly general Windows 11 facility before the 25H2 release appears later this year (in October, if history is any guide). The rollout could even stretch into 2026, if telemetry from users who gain early access to QMR turns up issues that need fixing before it goes into fully general distribution. (Search for “Quick Machine Recovery” on the Windows Roadmap for the feature’s current status.)

In other words, QMR is still a work in progress. Even so, it’s very much worth knowing about — and testing, especially in business environments.

What is Quick Machine Recovery?

As the name suggests, QMR is an optional Windows feature that, if enabled, permits Windows devices to recover should they experience some error that prevents them from booting. Most interestingly, QMR can search in the cloud for remediations for errors it recognizes — notably, an update of some kind that renders a machine unbootable — and apply relevant fixes so that Windows devices recover more or less automatically.

As the Microsoft Learn article about QMR notes, somewhat understating things, when QMR works it can “significantly reduc[e] the burden on IT administrators when multiple devices are affected.” Indeed, the feature was introduced as part of Microsoft’s Windows Resiliency Initiative in response to the CrowdStrike incident of July 19, 2024, when a misconfigured software update caused Blue Screens of Death (BSODs) and boot failures in more than 8 million Windows PCs around the globe.

Had QMR been available at that time, systems that experienced outages as long as 5 days while waiting for IT intervention could have been put right in minutes instead. That’s the kind of benefit that makes it hard to overstate QMR’s potential value, especially for business computing.

QMR: Cloud or auto remediation?

QMR supports two primary modes for recovery: cloud and automatic remediation. Cloud remediation relies on Windows Update to find remediations and apply fixes to devices. For this option to work, such devices must use Windows Update during recovery. If QMR is disabled, Windows uses Startup Repair (part of the Windows Recovery Environment, a.k.a. WinRE) to attempt recovery on a local (per-machine) basis.

Microsoft provides a useful caveat regarding QMR in general and cloud remediation in particular: “Quick machine recovery is a best-effort feature. It might not always be able to find a solution for every issue.”

That said, if both QMR and auto remediation are enabled, no user action is needed to attempt quick machine recovery. Only if QMR is enabled and auto remediation is disabled will a user action be required to click the QMR entry in a WinRE screen to launch that action.

Indeed, auto remediation supports automation for its recovery processes. That means a device need only trigger QMR through a failure to boot. The PC will boot into WinRE, and then connect to Windows Update (WU) automatically and seek remediation. If a first attempt should fail, the device will retry remediations (or other options) with no manual intervention required.

If auto remediation is disabled or not configured, affected Windows devices do require manual intervention to continue recovery, typically through the WinRE recovery options screen shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: WinRE recovery options include access to Quick Machine Recovery search, troubleshooting tools, and PC power-off items.Chris Hoffman / Foundry

According to Microsoft, Windows Home devices will have cloud remediation enabled and auto remediation disabled by default. On the other hand, Windows Pro, Education, and Enterprise devices will have both disabled by default. If auto remediation is enabled, admins will be able to set scanning intervals and time-outs.

The QMR process, step-by-step

When a Windows device fails to boot two or more times, the affected device boots into WinRE to initiate QMR. This leads to a sequence of efforts:

Diagnosis: With WinRE controlling the target device, QMR seeks to identify the problem or issue causing boot failure.

Network connection: With information to share about what it finds on the target PC, QMR connects to Windows Update in the cloud.

Solution search: The diagnostic information is checked against known solutions or fixes.

Remediation: If a solution is identified, it is run on the target PC to attempt a repair.

If all goes well, QMR works through these stages in order, and in reasonably good time. When testing QMR (as described in the next section), users will see a series of outputs, each overtopped by the Windows 11 logo and the spinning balls that indicate processing is underway.

Taking QMR for a test drive

Given a specific sequence of commands (described below and depicted in Figure 2), you can get a sense of how QMR works and watch it go through its paces. To test QMR, you must be running Windows 11 24H2 Build 26100.2652 or newer — or, for those in the Windows Insider program, Dev Channel Build 26200.5722 or newer / Beta Channel Build 26120.3653 or newer.

And, of course, QMR must be enabled.

To get started, open an administrative PowerShell session. To check if QMR is enabled or not, run these commands:

Reagentc /GetRecoverySettings

If the output shows the value for CloudRemediation as 0 (zero), you need to enable QMR. The best way to do that is to enable the recovery agent environment itself by typing:

Reagentc /Enable

Turning on the test will ensure that QMR is ready to work on your behalf in test mode. Here’s how:

Reagentc /SetRecoveryTestmode

Next, you’ll instruct the recovery agency to boot to the Windows Recovery Environment (and invoke QMR because of the previous test mode setting) like this:

Reagentc /BootToRE

Please note that the command interpreter doesn’t care about capitalization, so you needn’t include initial or inter-caps at the command line. But I’m showing what Microsoft does in its Learn article, if only for consistency.

After you enter these commands, you’ll need to restart the test PC. (But don’t do so until you’ve saved anything open you may need again in the future.)

Figure 2 shows all of the foregoing commands, plus a second GetRecoverySettings command to show current WinRE settings, capped off with a shutdown and restart command to forcibly restart your test PC.

Figure 2: PowerShell commands to check, enable, and test QMR on a suitable PC.
Ed Tittel / Foundry

After you reboot Windows, it should come up in QMR’s test mode. QMR will report through a sequence of individual [Test Mode] phases as it works through its process. As shown in Figure 3, such screens feature the white text on a black background typical of boot-time activities overseen by WinRE. Each one appears by itself, but they’re shown stacked in order of appearance to make things easier to follow.

srcset=”https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/quick-machine-recovery-fig03-qmr-stages.png?quality=50&strip=all 795w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/quick-machine-recovery-fig03-qmr-stages.png?resize=300%2C115&quality=50&strip=all 300w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/quick-machine-recovery-fig03-qmr-stages.png?resize=768%2C294&quality=50&strip=all 768w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/quick-machine-recovery-fig03-qmr-stages.png?resize=150%2C57&quality=50&strip=all 150w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/quick-machine-recovery-fig03-qmr-stages.png?resize=640%2C245&quality=50&strip=all 640w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/quick-machine-recovery-fig03-qmr-stages.png?resize=444%2C170&quality=50&strip=all 444w” width=”795″ height=”304″ sizes=”(max-width: 795px) 100vw, 795px”>Figure 3: As QMR goes through its paces in test mode, you’ll see it work through diagnosis, connection, solution search, and a repair attempt.Ed Tittel / Foundry

When the QMR test is done, Windows will reboot normally. That’s how you know the test has succeeded as well: Windows is running again. In a real-world situation, this turns a non-booting PC into one that boots normally, after all.

Completing this test went pretty quickly for me: on a 14th Gen Intel laptop, it took less than 4 minutes from start to reach the desktop after QMR did its thing. Because I’ve not used QMR to fix an actual boot failure, I can’t say for sure that the test run is quicker than the real thing would be. But that’s my best guess, and I’ll stick to that line until experience teaches me otherwise.

After the test, a notification

After you perform the test and the OS reboots, Windows 11 posts a related notification to the Notification Center. It looks something like Figure 4 (but may come in a light theme format, rather than the dark theme shown). The text reads “We removed some recently installed updates to recover your device from a startup failure” — the same message you’d receive if Windows had recovered from a real startup failure, not just a test. (Learn more from Microsoft Support.)

srcset=”https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/quick-machine-recovery-fig04-recover-notification.png?quality=50&strip=all 518w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/quick-machine-recovery-fig04-recover-notification.png?resize=300%2C123&quality=50&strip=all 300w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/quick-machine-recovery-fig04-recover-notification.png?resize=150%2C61&quality=50&strip=all 150w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/quick-machine-recovery-fig04-recover-notification.png?resize=444%2C182&quality=50&strip=all 444w” width=”518″ height=”212″ sizes=”(max-width: 518px) 100vw, 518px”>Figure 4: Once QMR makes a repair, it posts an item to the Notification Center (even for a test run).
Ed Tittel / Foundry

Presumably, if QMR comes into play to fix a real startup failure — not a simulated one, as occurs during the test — this notification serves to inform users of the change that’s occurred to restore their Windows device to working order.

Caveat: The test platform matters

In attempting to use QMR, I worked from a number of PCs with CPUs of varying generations. I observed that older PCs (up to and including Intel 10th-gen CPUs) did not support QMR testing. On an 11th-gen system running the Beta Channel Insider Preview, the QMR test ran, but it did not show KB5056862 in Update History in Windows Update. On a 13th-gen system also running the Beta Channel Insider Preview, the QMR test ran and the aforementioned update appeared in Update History, as shown in Figure 5.

Depending on which version of Windows 11 you’re running, the actual Knowledge Base (KB) article number will differ. Thus you’ll want to look for an item that starts with “Quick machine recovery update for Windows 11…” and whatever KB number goes along with what’s running on your test PC at the time.

Figure 5: On a new-enough PC, you’ll see a KB item in Update History showing that QMR is enabled and ready to test. YMMV on older systems.
Ed Tittel / Foundry

Though Microsoft doesn’t seem to document this limitation of QMR, the tool does work on newer systems I tested, but not on older ones. Keep this in mind, should you wish to conduct your own tests.

Open questions about QMR

Right now, testing is about all one can do with QMR. The rubber will meet the road when a rogue update comes along that needs undoing to restore affected Windows PCs to normal operation.

In my opinion, the most likely instructions in a QMR remediation will be DISM commands to remove packages with known pathologies that restore Windows to working order after they’re gone. Microsoft hasn’t published developer instructions yet (not that I can find, anyway) that explain how to create QMR remediations for third-party updates. Given what happened with CrowdStrike last summer, however, I’m sure that’s just a matter of time and circumstances.

QMR promises to make things much, much easier for admins who need to undo ill-behaved updates, either from Microsoft or makers of other software. In the next few months, we’ll learn if it lives up to that promise and see if it can automatically fix things when Windows won’t boot.