Create a Bootable USB Recovery Drive in Windows 10 - TIPS

1. Pay attention to the numerous warnings to create a recovery drive before a failure.
2. Use a 32gb USB stick formatted as NTFS - even though there is lots of advice to use 16gb formatted as FAT32.

My creation of recovery drive failed twice after several hours until I tried 32gb NTFS in desperation.
My PC was running desperately slowly while using 89-100% cpu. I spent many hours tweaking before concluding that I needed to do a complete reinstall.

Creating the recovery drive took 12 hours + several hours for failed attempts. This would have been a lot faster if I had done it when the PC was healthy.

Booting from recovery drive and then letting Win10 configure itself only took 1 hour - and the result was a perfect machine!

Windows 10 Home (x64) Version 1909 (build 18363.1139)
It took a lot of searching to discover that on my Lenovo Ideacentre 520 it was necessary to keep pressing F12 to boot from USB.

Hello @JoeR,
Does this process not reformat the USB?
Create Recovery Drive in Windows 10

However, an NTFS formatted USB drive will not boot in UEFI mode on most computers. That's why the Microsoft Media Creation Tool makes a FAT32 USB flash drive.

In desperation, I followed advice from another forum to format the USB stick as NTFS (and used a 32gb stick for safety). All I can say is that it worked and solved my problem. Previous attempts with two 16gb sticks formatted as FAT32 failed (after many hours because the PC was crippled and desperately slow).

I knew that the Windows Recovery Media Creator would reformat the stick as FAT32 which explains why it was able to boot in UEFI mode.

Thanks for suggestions of simpler solutions e.g. Macrium. I spent hours trying credible solutions that I found on various forums. PC was crippled (even in safe mode) - it was almost impossible to install anything and refused to restore from restore points.

I had full data backups (phew). Once I managed to create a recovery drive I decided to proceed with a "guaranteed" solution and just pretend that my HDD had died. and completely ignore my broken W10.

I felt that success with a fresh W10 was guaranteed (it was).

I will investigate Macrium to see if it could help me avoid future nightmares like this.

Having achieved success on PC #1 I thought it would be easy to create bootable USB recovery drive on PC #2 which is working perfectly. I was wrong - still took two attempts (3 hours).
When the first attempt failed, I tried again with some changes:

• Reformatted brand new memory stick as NTFS, but did not use Quick Format
• Restarted PC
• Disabled Norton 360
• On this second attempt creation of USB drive worked successfully

It seems that one just has to keep trying with slight variations. Microsoft Recovery Media Creator is temperamental.

PC #2 has Microsoft Home version 2004 (OS Build 19041.630)

Does USB recovery drive option wipe out the entire hard disk or just Windows installation Drive C?

Hi!I run a dual boot Linux and Windows 10 Home 64 bit machine.

I am testing the various backup and recovery options of Windows 10 on a USB stick and so far I have seen the USB recovery option as the best for me.I am creating a USB recovery drive using steps as shown in video URL link How to make a Windows 10 USB recovery drive - YouTube and have backed up my Windows using this option and now wanted to test recovery.

My machine hard drive is partitioned as follows.

1)Drive C - Its the partition where my Windows 10 is installed.

2)Drive D - An NTFS partition where all my data is stored and both my Windows and Linux can access it.

3)I have several Linux BTRFS partitions that host my Linux.

I want to simulate complete failure of my Windows 10 (even failure of hard disk forcing me to restore Windows on a new hard drive) such that even system restore cannot work and I cant boot Windows at all.I have seen from USB recovery when I boot from USB disk I can select "Recover from a drive" and there are 2 options within this i.e. "Just remove my files" and "Fully clean my drive".I wanted to understand the difference between these 2 options so if someone can clearly explain it to me please do.


Also,more importantly,I wanted to know if I utilized any of these 2 options above,will I still be able to retain data on my NTFS drive D and retain my Linux Partitions intact without losing any info on these partitions or will using either of these options fully clean my entire hard drive thus lose all data in Drive D and Linux forcing me to restore my linux and NTFS data partition from another backup?I dont mind losing all
data from Drive C where my Windows is installed since my important data is in Drive D thus kindly advice what happens when I use either of the 2 options above with regards to just clearing out Windows installation Drive C or wiping out my entire hard drive thus losing my data and linux also.

Thanks.