Windows 10: recovery drive of W10 Home

I have decided, for 'just in case something happens', to make a recovery drive of my Windows 10 Home (version 10.0.19042) on a 32gb usb drive. In doing so, Windows has deleted most of my personal documents on the C: drive (mostly doc/pdf/xls), but not some of the ones on desktop. I have rolled back to a previous restore point, but couldn't get the files back. I have checked on the recovery drive-mounting the .iso on a virtual drive, extracting with 7zip etc.- and the files aren't there. Have I lost them for good?

:)

 

Windows 10 Recovery

When I used the W10 Pro recovery disk from other CPU, it went through the first steps and left me at the screen listing the various partitions on the drive. I choose what was the C drive and it returned the following:

'Windows cannot be installed on this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks.'

I will try what you suggested and get back.

Matt

 

Recovery Drive

Hi,

Thank you for posting your concern. In some cases, this could happen if you created a system restore point on your computer. Windows will use the recovery drive to revert to the previous time where your computer is working properly, or where you created
it. Please don't attempt to put any files in the recovery drive or the restore process will fail. To give you more suggestion and helpful information, we would like to more about your computer. Please answer the question below:

• Did you make any changes to your computer before this issue occurs?
• Have you install Windows Update before getting the Recovery drive?
• Which version of Windows are you using? To check it, follow the steps through this
  link.
  

In the meantime, you can check the files inside the recovery drive and confirm if there are essential files that you need.

We'll be waiting for your response.

 

Heads Up, W10 Recovery Drive

When creating a recovery drive W10 prompts you with: "Everything on this drive will be deleted. If you have any personal files on this drive, make sure they are backed up".

They are not kidding. It wipes the entire drive, not just the partition.



I partitioned a 200 G USB Hard drive into two partitions F (34 G) for the recovery image, and G (150 G) for a Windows backup image. The recovery drive image wants 32Gb to use. My system has 80 gig so I'm not sure how I'll ever recover from a hard drive
failure, but I played along to see how recovery drive works.

Windows Recovery Drive prompted me which drive to use. F or G. I selected the F partition.

It then prompted me to format my F drive which I did. However in creating the recovery drive it apparently repartitioned the drive and in turn deleted the G partition. The damn thing then sits there for hours "Copying System"

/editorial:

My goal in this exercise was to move from a hard drive to a new SSD. I did not want to reinstall the whole OS and reload every app. I found the whole "Recovery Drive" deceiving to say the least. I'm an MCSE, but the average user trying to save their
data to "recover" from a hard drive failure will be deeply disappointed with the "recovery" drive method. My suggestion would be a full backup to a network device. Microsoft makes this who process way harder than it needs to be. Moving to a new SSD without
encryption should not be this hard. Locking an OS install to a specific hard drive is insane.

keywords: W10, Recovery Drive, data loss, partition, USB, Waiting