How to Create a Recovery Boot USB

[KJJ]

After losing Windows 10 once, I've learned my lesson. Fortunately with the help of MS support, I was able to reload W10. And Carbonite was able to reload my files, albeit it took several days. Now I've got religion. I purchased an external hard drive for backup purposes and have since created a system image.

I would like to create a W10 boot recovery USB flash drive. I'm a bit confused after watching some YouTube instructional videos. These instructional videos seemed to indicate that a 16GB flash drive was more than sufficient. I subsequently purchased a 16GB flash drive. However after starting the process, Windows indicated that a 64GB flash drive was required. Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you.

 

[Trouble]

My personal preference is to use the installation media and let it do double duty as your recovery / repair boot device as well as its' intended purpose (to install Windows 10) or perform an in-place upgrade / repair should the need arise.
The installation media can be obtained through either of these two resources.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/techbench
OR
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Once you have the ISO, you can use ImgBurn to burn it to a DVD or Rufus to burn it to a USB ThumbDrive, either of which you can use to boot your computer.
http://imgburn.com/index.php?act=download
http://rufus.akeo.ie/

For UEFI / GPT systems

For legacy BIOS and MBR....
Simply change #2 to "MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI"
Which should automatically change #3 to "NTFS"

 

[Saltgrass]

If you are using the Windows 10 Recovery drive maker, is this an original Windows 10 install or an upgrade?

My drive was around 8 GBs for an Original Windows 10 OEM install, but it may depend on what you have on your system. A 32 GB drive worked fine on my system. The recovery drive is meant to reinstall Your Windows 10 and does not appear to backup your personal files. There may be some archived folders the utility is looking at for that extra space but I am not sure.