Windows 10: Failed to reset laptop with USB recovery drive

Trying to reset my lenovo Y700.


Created a recovery drive on a flash drive, booted from it to the reset tool.

Tried reseting with "Just remove my files" option, failed with the following message

"There was a problem reseting your PC.No changes were made."


Tried resetting with "Fully clean the drive" option, failed.

Tried "Startup repair", failed.

Tried command prompt, can't find C drive.

Tried booting from hard drive, "No bootable device".


Now I am stuck with a laptop that doesn't boot up to anything besides the reset tool, where every option is failing. Please help! :

:)

 

Windows 10 recovery USB - which size???

Not even that. What creating a recovery drive does (if you select 'include system files') is to construct the files required to clean install Windows. If this is made on an OEM install these file will include the OEM custom apps and drivers - effectively a 'factory reset' drive. It is extracting an install image from your existing system files that takes the time.

The steps in making a recovery drive are shown in this tutorial...

Create Recovery Drive in Windows 10 | Tutorials

• first you choose whether or not to include system files (step 5 in tutorial)
• next the recovery drive files are constructed (this can take a long time if you include system files)
• only after that is complete will you be asked which usb to use (step 6 in tutorial). At this point you will be told how large a usb you need.

Without system files 512 Mb is sufficient. Including system files it will be just over 4GB.

At which step did you get the error? If you were not asked which usb to use then it was the construction of the system files that failed, nothing to do with what usb you had.

 

How to reformat USB Recovery Drive

Part of the commands and results were missing from the image.

Open adminstrative command prompt and type or copy and paste:
diskpart
list disk
select disk #
(replace # with the disk number for the flash drive)
attributes disk clear readonly
exit


If the above steps work then you are set.
If the above steps fail then view this link for additional troubleshooting steps:
How to Format Read-only USB Drive Successfully?

 

Win10 Reset This PC/Recovery Drive fails, overwrites wrong drive!

System: Lenovo Thinkpad P51, 2 drives, 1 x NVMe, 1 x HDD.

I replaced the NVMe drive and attempted to reinstall Windows using a USB Recovery drive created on this system before any problems. This failed and would have resulted in data loss if I didn't have other backups. From my perspective, there seem to be a
number of critical bugs in this recovery environment for machines with more than 1 drive.

Steps:

1. booted from USB recovery drive
2. Select Troubleshoot
3. Select Recover from a drive
4. Select either Just remove my files or Fully clean the drive

Result:

1. Appears to be working, but fails at 77% in. Error message "There was a problem resetting your PC. No changes were made."
2. There was no prompt for which drive to use. The existing HDD was silently repartitioned. No changes were made is an incorrect statement. There was no windows install on the HDD.
   
3. The repartitioned HDD was never made bootable. So the system still can't boot into Windows.

Problems/Bugs:

1. No prompt for which drive to reset/install windows on.
   
2. No information about which drive has been selected before prompting to proceed.
3. Misleading information "No changes were made". when one of the drives had been repartitioned.
4. No information about what failed or how to get to any logs. How should someone attempt to troubleshoot the problem?
5. There doesn't seem to be an option to force a particular drive to be used as the system drive.
6. Some of the menus for Troubleshoot are lacking "Back". In some cases you need to select an operation before you get to a point where you can hit cancel. There are no assurances when you select those options that you will be given a chance to cancel.

Questions:

1. Is the reset my PC / Recovery drive utility usable on a multi-drive system?
2. Without physically removing drives (the bios/uefi doesn't have a disable option AFAICT) how do I set which drive is the system drive to be installed/updated/etc.?
   
3. Should I be attempting to file any bug reports?

Note: I'm aware that I should be able to use the media creation tool on another system to do a generic Windows 10 install. However, I'd prefer to reinstall the factory environment with the OEM drivers already installed.