New
#11
For the past couple of weeks, I too have been wracking my brains on this media creation tool error 0x80042405-0xA001B -- I even went as far as buying new USB flash drives thinking it was the security mechanism in SanDisk flash drives. This afternoon I downloaded a USB flash drive formatter and noticed the format failed because access to the drive was locked exclusively by a background process. Using process explorer as described in How to check what process is your holding external device , I was able to locate the mysterious process that had exclusive access to the flash drive, in my case was a shadow backup app. Once I closed the process, started the media creation tool and was successful. Performed the task two more times success. I hope this helps.
Took me a few tries (and formats), but I finally managed:
Quick format USB drive NTFS.
Put 'MediaCreationTool1903' onto USB drive.
Right-click and 'Run as Administrator'.
Installation media for another PC...
Architecture BOTH (x32 and x64)
When the File Explorer window on my USB closed, I pulled it back up and left it selected for the entire duration thereafter.
Nothing else I tried, several times, worked. It finally did and the aforementioned is how (I did NOT delete the temporary files, '$Windows.~BT' and $Windows.~WS' generated in C:\ and nor did I screw around with Diskpart as I see suggested ad nauseam for this problem).
Using a 8GB PNY flash drive (and used my chassis front USB 3.0 port), which I'd already used for this back in 2016.
Hopefully this helps somebody. My error was also 0x80042405 - 0xA001B.
Last edited by Mortiferon; 27 Jun 2019 at 09:10. Reason: My bad, its an 8GB not 16GB drive
The July 26, 2019—KB4505903 (OS Build 18362.267) cumulative update permanently fixes this error and this error no longer occurs. Addresses an issue that causes failures to create a recovery drive (USB key) with the error, ”0x80042405[gle=0x00000715].” https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...date-kb4505903