New
#1
Win 10 recovery USB disk
I am trying to create a recovery USB drive from which I can install Windows 10 fresh, if needed. Or quickly restore system images in case of a drive issue. There are a couple of things I am not clear about.
Background:
I have an ASUS laptop that came with Windows 8.1, UEFI (upgraded to Windows 10 at the moment). Initially, I created a Windows 8.1 recovery USB and reinstalled Win 8.1 using it. From what I understand, the 100MB EFI partition is normally the first one. On restoration, the following was created
305 MB Win 8.1 system partition
100 MB EFI
C drive
Manufacturer recovery partition
When it upgraded to Win 10, it ended up with the following partition structure
305 MB Win 8.1 system partition
100 MB EFI
C drive
450 MB system partition (I believe this is Win 10 system partition)
Manufacturer recovery partition
Questions:
The trouble is, now when I create a Windows 10 recovery USB drive, it really creates just a rescue drive (< 1GB in size) even though the 'copy system files' option is selected. I believe a recovery USB drive needs at least a 16GB drive. Not sure what is happening here?!!!
Also, is there a way to make Win 8.1 recovery create the system partition adjacent to the C drive so it can resize it to 450 MB during the upgrade? Or maybe create a 500MB partition beforehand that Win 8.1 uses during recovery and later is upgraded to Win 10? Can I create the partitions beforehand using GParted Live USB and expect the Windows recovery process to use them?
Yes, 305MB is a small amount. Would be nice if the entire drive was used in a neat structure instead of leaving unused partitions.