One of our laptops had a Windows issue that needed a reinstall of the computer. I placed an online order on the Lenovo website for the recovery media and downloaded it. So far so good.
I now had the Lenovo USB Recovery Creator software, so I thought it was a matter of an hour or two before the laptop was going to be fine again. Big mistake.
I ran the USB Recovery Creator and signed in, selected my digital order and downloaded the media. This already took 2 or 3 attempts before it was successful.
The next step involved creating the actual usb stick. I inserted a working USB stick but the Lenovo USB Recovery Creator failed to partition it. And again. And again. And again. Tried it at least 15 times, no luck.
Eventually found the solution in a post somewhere on Reddit ( I don’t have the link anymore otherwise I would include it). The solution was creating a primary 32GB FAT32 partition on the stick using diskpart, and assigning it a drive letter. Don’t partition or don’t assign a drive letter: Lenovo USB Recovery Creator will fail guaranteed.
Here is the short instruction to create that partition:
Search for “Command Prompt” in the Start menu, right-click it, and select “Run as administrator”.
Type ‘diskpart’ and press Enter. The diskpart utility will open in the Command Prompt.
Type ‘list disk’ and press Enter. This will show a list of all connected disks, including your flash drive.
Identify your flash drive by its size in the list. Be careful to select the correct disk.
Type ‘select disk X’ (replace X with the number of your flash drive) and press Enter.
Type ‘clean’ and press Enter. This will erase all data and partitions on the selected disk.
Type ‘create partition primary size=32768’ and press Enter.
This command creates a 32GB partition (32,768 MB).
Type ‘select partition 1’ and press Enter to select the newly created partition.
Type ‘format fs=fat32 quick’ and press Enter. This will quickly format the partition to FAT32.
Type ‘assign’ and press Enter. This assigns a drive letter to the new partition, making it accessible in File Explorer.
Type ‘exit’ and press Enter to close Diskpart, then close Command Prompt.