Skip to main content

Rescue Media Builder resulting in unusable USB sticks [SOLVED]

Thread needs solution

 Tried to create Recovery Media on USb thumb drive - WIN-PE option.  Operation appearred to progress but at end failed with 'Unable to create rescue media'. USB drive is now not usable as cannot be formatted in Windows or with Diskpart- have tried with two different drives, both now unusable - Any ideas?

0 Users found this helpful

The creation of WinPE requires the installation of the appropriate ADK package prior to attempt to make media,  Did you do that?

Running the clean command with diskpart then format as FAT 32 should make the drives usable again.

DrMopp, what size of USB drives are you using for the Recovery Media, ideally these should be 32GB or less due to restrictions that Microsoft places on drives of a larger capacity.

In terms of recovering the unusable drives, try using such as MiniTool Partition Wizard - or alternatively try the HP USB Disk Format Tool or USB Disk Storage Format Tool 5.3

 Thanks for quick responses, the drives used were 4Gb, 7Gb and 32Gb.  I thought I had installed the ADK package but will need to check.  Running 'clean' in diskpart and then trying to format failed, and Steve, none of the tools you suggested were able to format the drives either.

Thanks for the update, sorry to hear that you have had no luck in formatting these drives.  7GB sounds an unusual size - they are normally in sizes, 1,2,4,8,16, 32,64,128 etc.

When using diskpart, did you try the following commands in order?

diskpart
list disk   (to identify USB drive, i.e. 1)
select disk 1 (as identified above)
clean
create partition primary
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign
exit

Thanks again Steve, drive now formatted successfully, had omitted the 'create parttition primary'  and 'active' commands.  The drive is actually an 8Gb EMTEC but shows in Windows as 7.18Gb. Recovery media created successfully!

Good deal - glad it's working for you now!  If you haven't tried it yet, you can also build some custom WinPe with our MVP tool (linked below). Download the advanced version (it's easy to use - only advanced because it adds some things like a usable web browser, file exprloer, 7zip functionality and some other useful items into your rescue media too).  Other than that, the functionality of Acronis is exactly the same, but the WinPE itself, is a lot more functional.  

DrMopp, glad to hear the diskpart commands were able to recover the 'broken' USB sticks! and you have created the Rescue Media OK now.