4 Solutions for Windows 10 Can't Create Recovery Drive

Can't create a recovery drive after many attempts

"Today I tried to create a recovery USB drive but failed. I got the error message displaying in the below screenshot, it says 'We can't create a recovery drive' with the added information 'A problem occurred while creating the recovery drive'. I don't get to the screen to select the USB flash drive, so no indication of what the problem is about. It's a 64GB formatted USB drive by the way."

Some reasons for not being able to create a recovery drive in Windows 10, 8 or 7

You can create an either USB flash drive or optical disc based recovery drive on a Windows platform, which lets you easily access a failing Windows system that won't boot. Regardless of how you create a recovery drive, sometimes the whole process doesn't accomplish as expected, and one of the commonly seen error Windows displays is about 'we can't create a recovery drive' without pointing out the exact error source.

So, you have to dig out by yourself, by learning some general reasons and making a preliminary judgment.

1_ The option 'back up system files to the recovery drive' requires at least 16GB USB flash drive.
2_ USB flash drive is with corruption problem that Windows can't format everything on the drive so as to create a recovery drive.
3_ Windows file system has corrupted.

4 highly recommended solutions for can't create recovery drive in Windows 10, 8 or 7

Based on those mentioned causes that perhaps prevent you from creating a recovery drive in Windows successfully, here are 4 highly suggested solutions that proved to be useful when the recovery drive creation stuck, failed and sent error message 'We can't create a recovery drive'.

Solution 1_ Prepare another USB flash drive

If you got an extra USB hard disk in your hand, go ahead replacing the current one and start afresh to create a recovery drive in the same way.

Solution 2_ Check & repair USB disk errors

In the case that your flash drive has been using for several years and was formatted many times, it's necessary to check its health state and try to fix the bad sectors on it if found any.

Step 1. Press Windows key + X, click Command Prompt (Admin).
Step 2. In the Command Prompt window, type chkdsk E: /f /r /x. Here you should replace E with your drive letter.

Solution 3_ Check & repair system files corruption

Try to run a System File Checker (SFC) scan to check for any file corruption. SFC scan will scan for corrupt system files on the computer and repair them.

Step 1. Press Windows key + X, click Command Prompt (Admin).
Step 2. In the Command Prompt, type the command sfc /scannow and then press enter.

Solution 4_ Create a USB recovery drive in another way

We think a third-party bootable USB creation tool as the last resort to solve the problem of Windows can't create a recovery drive. When you find no reason and the corresponding solution to troubleshoot the displayed error, try EaseUS free backup software to create EaseUS Todo Backup bootable disk, which works the same as a Windows USB recovery drive for the purpose of disaster recovery and boot from USB on a Windows 10 PC.

Step 1. Prepare a USB drive and correctly connected to a Windows computer that has EaseUS Todo Backup installed.

Step 2. Launch EaseUS Todo Backup, click Tools -> Create Emergency Disk.

Step 3. Select Create WinPE emergency disk -> USB.

Step 4. Click Proceed to create a bootable disk.