Win 10 Backup Nightmare - I Cant Find A Way To Restore ISO (fat32) usb

I have a Dell 5749 laptop. I got the free upgrade to win10. I am about to sell the laptop and so i done a completely fresh install including all the drivers. I then did a windows image backup which is about 17gb. A while ago i formatted the hard drive and so there is no recovery partition, i formatted it to a standard hard drive. I installed win10 in UEFI mode.

I thought i would buy a 32gb usb flash drive and provide the buyer with a image backup on the flash drive. So if things go wrong, they can restore to a freshly installed state. This obviously needs a recovery usb drive or recovery disc so one can restore the iso. I am unable to achieve this so i hope someone can help.

If i create a repair disc using the utility on win 10 i then have a bootable cd, my Dell cannot boot from a cd in UEFI mode, so i change the boot mode to legacy and boot from the cd, the option to restore from the image backup does not find any backups, i think this is because my flash drive is ntfs, i cannot use fat32 as the file is over 4gb. So i'm stuck when using the cd method.

If i create a usb repair drive using the win 10 utility it creates a bootable drive on my usb stick, this however is fat32, so i cannot store the backup on the same usb drive due to fat 32.

So please tell me how do i get this backup to work given that i have a bootable repair cd and the 32gb flash drive i bought.

I have wasted so much time on this and i hope someone can help me.

Use Macrium Reflect Free. Install it, create a Macrium Rescue drive of it onto the flash drive. Then create an image with it and save that on the same flash drive. Macrium Reflect will break the image up into 4GB files to be able to save it to the FAT32 flash drive.

Personally, though... when you buy a manufactured computer off the shelf the manufacturer does not provide any restore media and the purchaser is responsible for making it.

Thanks for your help. This sounds like a much better idea. I dont know why microsoft make it so difficult to recover from a recovery disc or drive. I thought that if i would stick with microsoft and it would look better but it sounds like Macrium Reflect is the way to go.

Im sure there was a recovery partition on the hard drive which i wiped off so this left no means of recovery even if recovery media was obtained. I was unsure i guess. It was a bit of a learning curve for me too, i wanted to get this backed up and so i was determined to get there one way or another.

Thanks for your great help

Macrium worked a treat, i dont know why Microsoft have made this task so difficult. The backup is easily stored on the Usb drive too. Many thanks for the good advice ill still to Macrium in the future.

cereberus said:

Bear in mind flash drives are not the most reliable of backup media and do fail more frequently than hard drives, so backing up to an externahard drive is more reliable (to both - even better). You can just copy the backup files.

Thanks for the good advice. For my own personal use i will just keep the usb as a bootable drive and store the backups on my NAS which has plenty of spare room.