Windows 365 Link Bare Metal Recovery 

Today I want to show you, how you can recover your Windows 365 Link device using Bare Metal Recovery.
This can be useful for example, when you removed the device from Intune and Entra ID without resetting the Link before and find yourself in the situation, that you would need the BitLocker recovery key that is no longer available, or in my case my Link device failed due to a power outage during a Windows Update, and now it refused to boot at all…

Creating the recovery media

First thing we need to do is to download the BMR sources in the variant that covers the required languages from the Microsoft learn site: Create-and-use-a-bmr-recovery-drive
In my case I will go with variant 1 which covers all my needed languages:

Once we have downloaded it, we can start with preparing the USB drive itself, search for recovery and start the Recovery Drive App on any Windows 11 device:

Make sure to uncheck the option “Back up system files to the recovery drive.”

Select the USB drive that you want to use:

Be aware that the USB drive that you choose will be formatted and all existing data will be removed.

Once the drive is ready, we can start to copy our actual image to the drive

We just open the downloaded .zip recovery image from before and copy over all the files to the root of the USB drive:

If asked, agree to overwrite existing files:

Recover our Windows 365 Link

Since my Link device is not able to boot at all, it will boot from the recovery drive automatically.
If the device is still booting to a degree, we can use the integrated WinRE environment to tell it to boot from the USB drive:

Or if everything else fails, we even can change the boot order from the integrated UEFI (can be accessed from WinRE or by using the pinhole button below the power connector on the Link itself):

Set USB to the first boot option to boot from the recovery drive:

Regardless of how we got the Link to boot from our USB drive, we should be presented with a language selection screen:

Once we select our preferences, we can proceed to recover from a drive:

We can skip the BitLocker screen here as we have all required data on our recovery drive:

I went with just remove files, as there is not really any user data on these devices in the first place:

And after about 20-30 minutes we will see our familiar OOBE screen from where we can start freshly…

Conclusion

The new Bare Metal Recovery option for our Windows 365 Link devices can be really helpful for all these edge cases where our only option in the past was to send them back to Microsoft to fix them. Now that we have an option to help ourselves in a quick and easy way, it is even faster to get such a workplace back to a working state.