Create The Usb Recovery Drive

[Alexia Borson]

Ifyour device encounters severe issues, such as an inability to access the operating system, you can utilize a recovery drive to access the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). It assists in the restoration of Windows or the execution of system restore points. To use a recovery drive, you must first prepare an empty USB flash drive (with a minimum of 16GB of space) to create a Windows recovery drive. As Windows undergoes periodic updates to enhance security and device performance, it is recommended to periodically create a new recovery drive.

Note: When restoring the device via a recovery drive, the original disk partition data on the system drive may be deleted. (If your device supports MyASUS in WinRE or ASUS Recovery, functionalities built into the disk partitions on the system drive will be removed.) If you wish to preserve these functionalities, you can restore the device through a system image, thereby backing up the data in the disk partitions. Learn more about How to create and use Windows System Image to restore your device.

If you experience the device cannot boot, you can use the recovery drive to enter Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), and then restore from a system restore point or reinstall Windows via the recovery drive.

I've tried several times to create a recovery drive with no success. I start with a 16 GB flash drive plugged in and run the process following the steps in the 'How to set up your ne Dell Computer'. The process starts, and runs for about 50 minutes, during which time the various screens indicate the steps are progressing and the green line moves from left to right. At the end, the final screen simply says that it failed --and there is no indication as to what the problem may have been.

If your goal here is just to create a backup of your entire O.S + files, might I suggest you go in another direction. Download Macrium reflect; it's free. Once downloaded and installed, go into other tasks and rescue media and let it build a startup for Windows 10. By doing this, you'll create a boot option when you first start your computer allowing you to switch to Macrium recovery in order to restore a complete OS image which you'll have on that Flash drive. I'd format the Flash drive again into NTFS, run Macrium Reflect and create an image on that Flash drive. I swear by this recovery software. It has saved me a bunch of times.

Following the link you provided above, the document "Error when trying to create backup media (System encounters an error when creating USB recovery drive in Windows 10)", in the 'Solution', I encounter a problem in step #2:--

Just tried the above link and it appears to have been successful; however, the instructions are somewhat confusing. It appears to assume that you want to download the recovery tool and upon completion run the tool to 'install' the downloaded image (not the image of the computer).

Since I did not want to re-load the image at this time I select the option to stop. Somewhat to my surprise it then gave me the option to create USB drive with the image. There was no advance warning the the 'primary' purpose appeared to be re-load the PC not simply create a USB drive.

Went to create a recovery USB drive on windows 11. After a while I was prompted to insert a USB drive of at least 32GB which I duly did but the "next" button stayed greyed out. After checking my USB drive I can see that there is actually only 28.8Gb available. Just to be sure I formatted it again and it stayed at 28.8GB. I checked a few other USB sticks I had lying around and they all seem to have capacity less than advertised (16GB is actually 14.7 etc).

I may have missed something else but the (real) capacity of 28.8GB seems to be what is stopping me from proceeding. I am sure that the good people of Microsoft know about USB drive capacities. Did they really mean us to get 64GB USB sticks to create recovery drives?

It appears that the issue you're encountering is a common one related to the way storage devices are marketed versus how operating systems calculate storage space.

Manufacturers often advertise storage capacity based on the assumption that 1GB equals 1 billion bytes. However, operating systems like Windows calculate 1GB as 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024^3 bytes), resulting in a lower displayed capacity.

For creating a Windows 11 recovery drive, a USB drive with a minimum capacity of 32GB is required. If your 32GB USB drive is showing only 28.8GB of available space, it may not be recognized by the recovery tool.

Here are some suggestions:

2. Use Disk Management or DiskPart: These built-in Windows tools can help delete all partitions on the USB drive and create a new single partition that utilizes the full capacity.

This was exactly what I was looking for and was a great solution. The only thing I would add is that a few weird things happen when you go to copy over the Surface Book recovery/boot image files to the flash drive:

I was nervous that there was something inherent in the files/folder structure that I would mess up by deleting what was on the existing recovery disk, or that it would only overwrite files that it needed to and some existing files would stay and cause issues. To get around this, I opened the folders that were there and cleared their contents, then copied the files over from the folders that matched in the Surface Book recovery files.

I've recently purchased Dell laptop and it has Windows 10 pre-installed on it. I plan to install Ubuntu GNOME 16.04.2 LTS on it. But before doing so, I want to make recovery disk of Windows 10 so that in case if I lose my Windows 10 installation while installing Ubuntu, I can get recover it.

Create a system repair disk: A system repair disk will try to, well, repair your OS (ie, system files used by Windows) in case it is not working properly. It will NOT, however, do anything to repair/restore your personal data, or changes that you've made to the OS, such as installing software. Also note that it cannot be used to re-install Windows.

Create a recovery drive: This will allow you to completely reset your Windows installation in case something goes wrong with your installation, but will not recover any of your personal files. If your computer came with a recovery partition, this may not be required.

In your case, since you may completely remove the Windows OS while installing Ubuntu, you should create a recovery drive. While you can also use create a system image or a system restore point and then restore your PC to it via the recovery partition, some PCs come without a recovery partition, and chances are that while installing a new OS, this partition may get corrupt too.

The reason you cannot use a DVD drive to create a recovery drive is that these are usually too large to fit on DVD drives. Flash drives aren't too expensive nowadays, and you can use a 8GB+ one perfectly, especially since your OS is a new install and doesn't have too many files/extra software.

Pro tip: Take note of your Windows 10 serial key too, and save it somewhere. In case you lose your Windows 10 installation, you can create a installation drive on another PC, and then use it to install Windows on your computer with the serial key.

Unfortunately, my notebook HP Pavilion 13 X360 201nx is not supported for cloud recovery. The problem also, is my original hard desk (500GB) crashed and I replaced it with a 1TB new hard desk. As it's brand new desk it has no OS. So I tried to recover using a recovery drive from my other HP notebook which is HP HP Stream Notebook - 13-c100nx (ENERGY STAR). The recovery process stopped after 3% progress and provide one option "Cancel".

If the information I've provided was helpful, give us some reinforcement by clicking the "Solution Accepted" on this Post and it will also help other community members with similar issue.

In literal terms, a Windows recovery disk is a bootable disc containing advanced recovery options, such as System Restore, Startup Repair, Safe Mode and Command Prompt, with which you can fix system errors and even reinstall Windows 10 or other OS from startup.

Since Windows 8, a new feature has been utilized to create a recovery USB, increasingly prevalent in Windows 10/11. Broadly, a "recovery disk" typically refers to a bootable USB; however, if a USB drive is unavailable or undesired, you can still use CD or DVD to create a system repair disc. But both recovery drive and repair disc can help you access recovery options when failing to boot Windows, which one should you choose? There are some differences between them:

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