Info - Creating a Recovery Drive in Windows 10 (Possibly 8.1 too).

[Galant]

Thought I'd share this because the solution took a while to come by - whole ton of Google digging. Thought it might be of use to someone else.

I can verify this worked for me running Windows 10 Home 64-Bit after upgrading from 8.1.

I was attempting to create a Recovery Drive (USB stick) with the Windows 10 Recovery window/tool. It requires a USB drive with at least 16GB capacity (so don't forget that a '16GB' stick by name won't cut it as it needs the full 16GB, so you'll need to go bigger - I went with a 32GB stick).

The process looks simple enough, choose the option to create a recovery drive, make sure that 'Backup System Files' is checked (assuming you want to be able to do a full recovery of Windows), and then, when insert the USB stick if you haven't already. (I noticed that it will auto-detect any suitable drive and simply won't show any unsuitable drives.)

After that it'll warn you about formatting the drive and erasing all data etc. etc. and if you proceed through it will then start the process and give you a progress bar along with text to state what it's doing at any given moment. It starts with Formatting (of course) and then moves onto transferring Utilities and on from there.

It was at this point that the process failed for me. I wasn't watching it like a hawk so I can't say on what exact stage the issue seemed to happen but it spat out an error stating that the drive could not be created - missing files. That was it. No further info. From there I tried again, same result. I checked the drive and some files and folders had been copied across but obviously it hadn't finished the job. I re-formatted the drive and tried again with the same result.

That's when the googling began. In the end it seems that the issue is that Windows needs a little assistance in knowing which drive and partition need to be used for the recovery because the solution lies in pointing Windows to the main partition of the main drive (C: for most people). Doing that was straightforward enough. Just get into an elevated command prompt and bang in a few commands which I'll post below.

Once I had done that I again tried to create the Recovery Drive in the exact same way using the same drive and it succeeded first time - and took about an hour or so. After it's completed it'll tell you that you can delete your recovery partition if you wish. (No thanks Windows, I'm not that desperate for space.)

I'm not sure what the cause if for the issue - whether it's a bug carried over from Windows 8, or particular to certain manufactures and the way they've partitioned their drives, or whether it's a result of the upgrade to Windows 10. Either way, though, the solution worked and I now have an up to date recovery drive for my Windows 10 laptop.

Here's the process for sorting the issue via the Command Prompt:

Open command prompt in elevated mode and type:
reagentc /disable (press enter)

then type:
reagentc /setreimage /path \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition1\Recovery\WindowsRE (press enter)

Then type:
reagentc /enable )press enter)

You may need to change "harddisk0" to "harddiskX" where X is the number of your "C" drive and "partition1" to partitionX where X is the partition number to conform with your system setup. To check go to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Diskmanagment. The disk partitions are numbered from the left of the screen starting with number 1.


Here's a link to the post I found on the Microsoft Answers website, although the author of the post states he got the solution from someone else on there: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...f9345b0?auth=1


Hope it helps.