Windows 10: Recovery Drive failure upon creation

This morning I formatted a new 16GB Verbatim usb drive. Proceeded to make recovery drive. About 90% finished and it stops with the message problem occurred creating recovery drive. Nothing else so don't know what happened. About the 90% mark a msg came up that Dell had updates to install. Would that have interfered with the process. NOthing got installed from Dell but don't know what effect the msg may have had. Not sure what to do now. Looked at the contents - EFI, reagent and sources on drive. Any thoughts??

:)

 

Recovery drive creation failure.

Personally I do not regard "a problem occurred" to be a valid error message under
any circumstances. However, after some investigation, it looks like I may have a root cause to ask about.

Basically, the recovery drive creation always bombs when trying to prepare the USB stick (and I've tried half a dozen of differing shapes, sizes, makes, models and speeds -
so the stick itself is out of the running as cause)

The end result is always an empty USB stick with no partitions on it.

Attempting to create and format a partition in Storage Management always creates the partition and
always fails to format it. Subsequent formatting through explorer always succeeds (and is
always prompted for).

Attempting to create and format using MiniTool Partition Wizard always
succeeds in one pass.

Dropping to a command prompt and going step-by-step using Diskpart throws a "cannot find file specified" error when attempting to format, so my guess here is that both Recovery Drive Creation and Storage Management are using Diskpart under the skin and this
is where the pig's ear is.

The Event Viewer shows an Error of "cannot zero sectors on disk" when Recovery Drive Creation or Storage Management is used as described. The disk referenced is the stick.

The Event Viewer shows a series of Warnings of "An error was detected on device during a paging operation" when Diskpart format is attempted. The disk referenced is the stick, so what the heck's it doing trying to page to it?

Finally, the question: As I'm all out of ideas at this point, how the heck to I get this to work?

 

Help! Failure trying to create a recovery drive in Windows 10

Hi,

Thank you for posting in Microsoft Community, we appreciate your interest in Windows 10.

I understand the inconvenience caused to you while creating the recovery drive on Widows 10 with error: "We can't create the recovery drive. A problem occurred while creating the recovery drive.", we will help you with this issue.

This issue might have occurred because of the recovery partition is not created during Windows setup, and will be unavailable for Windows to access and use for the purposes of copying recovery files to a CD or USB, resulting in the error above.

To fix the problem explained above, it is necessary to copy the appropriate files from the Windows 10 DVD to your PC, so that Windows can access and use them to create the recovery drive. Then, the recovery agent is configured with the new path to the setup
files and the creation can proceed.

Refer: How
to download official Windows 10 ISO files

Follow the below steps:

• Copy the contents of the Windows DVD to a folder on your C:\ drive.
• Launch an elevated command prompt window by typing in “cmd” in the search menu, and then pressing + + .
• Type in the following to re-configure Windows to point to the correct setup files location:
  

• reagentc /disable
• reagentc /setosimage /path C:\Win10\
• reagentc /enable

4. Verify the commands worked by typing in the following:

• reagentc /info

Later, I suggest you to try creating the recovery drive as suggested in the Microsoft article and check if it helps.

Creating a recovery drive

Hope it helps. Reply to the post with an updated status of this issue for further assistance.

 

Recovery drive creation failure.

Hi Napoleons,

Thank you for posting the query on Microsoft Community. I am sorry to know that you are facing issues with Windows 10.

I do appreciate your efforts and time, and will assist you with the issue.

Unable to Create Recovery USB Drive

If you have imaged your drive, there is a chance the System Reserved partition is not in the same place that your Windows installation thought it was, and attempts to create a recovery drive will fail with the following error:

"We can’t create a recovery drive on this PC"

"Some required files are missing. To troubleshoot problems when your PC can’t start, use your Windows installation disc or media."

When this happens, you can fix this problem by telling the program that creates the recovery drive where the recovery environment is located by entering the following commands into a command prompt:

• 
  Right click on Start icon and select “Command Prompt (Admin)”
  
• 
  reagentc /disable
  
• 
  result “REAGENTC.EXE: Windows RE is already disabled.”
  
• 
  reagentc /setreimage /path
  L:
  \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition1\Recovery\WindowsRE
  

This assumes your 450mb System Reserved partition is partition1. In my case, it was partition3. Keep trying partition1, partition2, partition3, etc. Until the command is successful.

You can also go into disk management by right-clicking the Windows 10 Start icon and click on Disk Management. Then look which partition is the 450mb System Reserved one for disk0. For me (which was a result of a Windows
7 upgrade), it was the 3rd partition. For a fresh installation it is probably the first partition and may be 500mb.

Then try again to create your recovery drive and check if it helps.

Hope this helps in resolving the issue. If the issue persists, do get back to us. We will be happy to assist you.