Due to the major issues faced, Windows may not be booted up, and guess what? It corrupts the whole file system, and you become unable to reinstall Windows. Don’t worry because, with Windows 8.1 and the latest versions, Microsoft added the “Recovery Drive” feature. What is it, and the method to create it? Let’s learn its details as we delve into them and explain everything step-by-step.

Today’s guide covers the following content:

• What is a Windows Recovery Drive?
• Steps for Creating a Windows Recovery USB Drive.

What is a “Windows Recovery Drive”?

The “Windows Recovery Drive” is a rescue USB drive for your system as it helps to recover from critical errors. It is a digital copy of your Windows on a separate drive that can be handy when you need to reset/recover your Windows OS.

The “Windows Recovery Drive” does not back up the personal files/folders from your disks, and it can only be used to store the backup of Windows OS and its files.

Steps for Creating a “Windows Recovery USB Drive”

To create a “Windows Recovery USB Drive”, make sure to meet the following requirements:

1. A USB drive with at least “16GB” of space.
2. A working Windows in/from which the recovery drive can be created.

The steps of making the “Windows Recovery USB Drive” include the following:

Step 1: Launch the Recovery Drive

The “Recovery Drive” is a GUI-based utility provided by Microsoft to create a USB recovery drive. To get started with it, press the “Windows” key, enter “Recovery Drive”, and trigger its launch using the “Run as administrator” option:

Step 2: Create a Recovery Drive

From the following window, check the “Backup system files to the recovery drive” option and hit the “Next” button to continue with the wizard:

It will now prompt if the USB drive is ready to be formatted, and triggering “Create” will take you to the next step of “Creating a Recovery Drive for Windows”.

Note: This will erase everything on the USB drive, so make sure to back up the data before doing this:

The setup wizard will now prompt you to select the USB drive. It is recommended only to connect the USB drive that is supposed to serve as the recovery drive:

Upon doing so, the process is started, and after a couple of minutes, it is completed with the message “The recovery drive is ready”. Lastly, hitting the “Finish” button achieves the desired task:

Conclusion

The “Recovery Drive” or the “Rescue USB Drive” is created using the “Recovery” settings on Windows 8.1 and onwards. Creating it requires a “16GB” USB and a working Windows system using which the “Recovery Drive for Windows” can be created. This USB drive can later recover the Windows OS to its original settings. Today, we explained the recovery drive creation for Microsoft Windows in a step-by-step guide.