My Recovery Drive

I had a scare last night. I was fiddling around with Windows X-Lite and later found my boot up system completely screwed up.

For the first time, Macrium Reflect rescue disk could not save my butt. There was this blue screen staring at me. No matter what I did, nothing seemed to work.

Eventually, I used HP online to factory install Windows (using my MCT) to save the day.

Now I realize the importance of having a USB recovery disk.

Taskbar | Search | Create a recovery drive | Select USB | Create

By the way, you need to be online to do that.

What are you using for the USB Recovery disk? Are you using one of the various inbuilt tools provided by Microsoft? Or something else? And what do you mean by MCT?

And yes I have faced a similar issue. Thankfully for me the laptop had a recovery partition inbuilt which helped me to reset it to 24H2 and from there Windows update did the rest.

Transcendence72 said:

And what do you mean by MCT?

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Media Creation Tool for Windows 10.


I usually get into trouble because of my misdeeds. I am too adventurous at times.

I forgot what I did exactly. But I was able to reinstall Windows by going online and using HP online guide. It helped restore the factory settings with my MCT Windows 10 plugged in. As for my original recovery partition, I deleted it a long time ago.

If memory serves me right, the Base Filtering Engine was unable to activate. probably due to a malware infection.

The BIOS after the recovery was not great though. There were a couple of glitches. But after using Macrium Reflect to restore my backup image, the BIOS settings were back to normal.

Like I said, this post was quite some time back. I don't exactly remember what the problem was and how I eventually solved it.

Transcendence72 said:

What are you using for the USB Recovery disk?

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Now I am using a recovery drive that I have created in case I need it in the future.

To create a recovery drive, do the following:
Administrative Tool | recovery Drive | Create a Recovery Drive (Use a 16GB USB stick, go online and create the drive).

Yeah in Windows 11 now a days it asks for 32GB memory stick instead of 16gb one.

Transcendence72 said:

What are you using for the USB Recovery disk?

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It's called a Recovery drive. The terminology helps to distinguish it from a 'Windows repair disk' [a thing that had a point years ago].
Create a Recovery drive - ElevenForumTutorials

Personally, as I said in one of your other threads, I prefer the combination of an installation USB & a driver backup [in addition to my first line of defence which is a system image with that facility's boot disk].
- I can use an installation USB for clean installs and for repair installs.
- Recovery drive recoveries used to be limited to re-writing Windows on entire disks with no facility for selecting specific partitions. So, for example, I could not recover to my partitioned disk in which my D:\ drive contains my data files without destroying that drive and all its contents. I have not seen anything to indicate that that limitation has disappeared.


All the best,
Denis