Attempted to Make Restore Thumb Drive

[Leon Purvis]

32 gig BRAND NEW UNUSED Sandisk thumb drive.

Year old 64 bit Dell.

Followed directions to create a restore thumbdrive.

Went to bed. Woke up and there were multiple blue screens indicating that theprocess failed. There were screens telling me how to recover lost data and programs. No suggested solution except to do a clean install.

WTH happened? I LOST EVERYTHING.

 

[Tim Locke]

Does this Sandisk drive have some files on it that you cannot remove and that formatting the drive wont remove either? Sandisk files to be exact. I had a Sandisk like that and IIRC there were some things that required an empty freshly formatted drive that would not work...this was a few years back.

 

[Leon Purvis]

I'll never know the answer to these questions. One thing that I know is that I reformatted two older drives to create a restore drive. Nothing was left on them. The drives wouldn't wouldn't even initiate a restore.

But no, I didn't reformat the new Sandisk. The instructions said to us a thumb drive that could hold AT LEAST 16 mg, so I used a brand new 32mg drive on the last try. When I initiated the restore drive process, I got a prompt that said something like "This process will erase any files on this drive and make them irrecoverable. Do you wish to proceed?"

I did scan the thumb drives for viruses, though I've never known this to create problems on any flash drive, new or old.

Thanks for the input.

 

[PowerBattery]

I need to create a system restore drive too. What do I have to do to the thumb drive so this doesn't happen to me?

 

[Bighorn]

The process used by the MCT/Media Creation Tool will reformat the Thumb drive to FAT32 wiping all the data off to give a clean drive. The suggestion to use 8GB [not MB] should be followed but I use 16GB and store the offline downloads of Build updates as they come out. Using Thumb drives larger than 32GB was useless to me as the MCT created a 32GB partition as FAT32 and the remainder of the drive was inaccessible. My last creation put Version 1709 Build 16299.15 on the drive. I have the last 4 Build updates on it, both 32-bit and 64-bit.