Unable to create Recovery Disk

[itma]

I have just installed Win 11 and tried to create a recovery disk but got a message:

   We Can't create a Recovery Disk

with the rather unhelpful comment:

    A problem occurred while creating the recovery drive

It is not a flash disk capacity problem as I started with 32 and tried all the way to 256GB, using one of the front panel USB sockets.

My Envy has 12GB RAM and an i7-9700 processor. I can't remember if I successfully create a recovery disk for Win 10.

Any suggestions?

[itma]

Additionally, disk manager says the I have a 475GB C: drive with 235GB free.

[BeemerBiker · Accepted solution]

This might be helpfull

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/we-cant-create-a-recovery-drive-when-trying-to...

You should run "Disk clean" followed by a disk check. Some backup fail fi there is a disk problem

Note that all the recover does is create a bootable win11 install.  This is not much different from downloading a Win11 ISO as none of your personal stuff is in the recovery.

[itma]

Thanks for your suggestion. It has HALF helped and I now have a basic recovery disk.

Unfortunately, things didn't work out quite as explained in the check list. All went fine until Step 7 where I didn't click "Finish". It then took took three clicks of the back arrow to get to the check box for backing up the system files. After clicking go, this ended up with the original problem of of getting the error message. This occurs even before you are asked to select which flash drive you want to use.

[BeemerBiker]

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@itma wrote:

Thanks for your suggestion. It has HALF helped and I now have a basic recovery disk.

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I am not sure what you mean.  Did you get a recovery USB?  If so can be marked as a solution.? if not then HP needs to see what the problem is.

If this worked it would be useful to know.

Thanks!.

[itma]

I say "half worked" because because the creation utility offers to create a bootable USB disk and backup the system files. I still have not been able to back up the system files. If my PC won't boot up, the most likely cause is a corrupt system file. I feel I don't have the expertise (or interest*) in debugging at this level so restoring a system file backup is an attractive option. Without the system file backup, the term "recovery disk" to my mind is a misnomer. It merely gets you back into the system so that you can effect recovery by other means, e.g. debugging or reloading the OS.

Any way, it looks as if this is as good as it's going to get so I'll regard the problem as solved, with many thanks.

*   I am now 85 years old and have too many things that I would rather be doing than getting into the guts of the operating system. I bought my fist PC in the 1980s: $3000+ for a floppy disk-based system and $1000 for a 10 MEGAbyte hard drive. I have used every version of Windows (and PCdos), even the awful V1, 2 and the first iterations of 3. I replace my hardware every 4 or 5 years and have not had a serious failure in the past 20 or so years. So the recovery disk is just insurance that I have not, of late, had to call upon.