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IDAnnoyed55's avatar
IDAnnoyed55
Copper Contributor
Nov 30, 2025

ISO FILE FOR CREATING WINDOWS RE-INSTALL MEDIA

I have separately posted questions regarding the difficulties in creating a Recovery Drive for Windows 11 - which does not recognise the MANY flash drives, sizes and formats that I have tried.

Also tried the Media Creation Tool which was a disaster.

So now I'm trying the option of creating an ISO file, which then supposedly will help me create bootable media to recover after a system crash etc.  I have FAITHFULLY followed the instructions at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11arm64.

There is a point where the "save as" in Explorer shows, and the file name shows with the extension of .iso.

But when I select save, it saves as Unconfirmed 737311.crdownload, and NOT as the ISO file.

I really wish that for once, I could follow the Windows instructions and have them work correctly first time.

After about 6 hours of trying to simply create a Recovery Drive or a System Repair Disk, I STILL have neither.  This makes me really uncomfortable that I don't have something to get my computer back up and running if it crashes.

HELP.

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1 Reply

  • Matthiasar's avatar
    Matthiasar
    Iron Contributor
    Dec 04, 2025

    This ongoing issue, even after many hours of effort, highlights the difficulties many users experience when trying to prepare for system failures. Not having a proper recovery drive or system repair disk can be very concerning, as it leaves your computer vulnerable in case of a crash. It's understandable that you feel frustrated and anxious about not having a dependable backup or recovery option.

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