Creating Windows USB Recovery Drive. 32GB Requirement

[xjohnom]

Hi,

Went to create a recovery USB drive on windows 11. After a while I was prompted to insert a USB drive of at least 32GB which I duly did but the "next" button stayed greyed out. After checking my USB drive I can see that there is actually only 28.8Gb available. Just to be sure I formatted it again and it stayed at 28.8GB. I checked a few other USB sticks I had lying around and they all seem to have capacity less than advertised (16GB is actually 14.7 etc).  

I may have missed something else but the (real) capacity of 28.8GB seems to be what is stopping me from proceeding. I am sure that the good people of Microsoft know about USB drive capacities. Did they really mean us to get 64GB USB sticks to create recovery drives?

Anybody know a way around this other than buying 64GB USB sticks.  Is there something I can do to the USB drive to make all 32GB available?

John O'

[#2]

Hi @xjohnom,

It appears that the issue you're encountering is a common one related to the way storage devices are marketed versus how operating systems calculate storage space.
Manufacturers often advertise storage capacity based on the assumption that 1GB equals 1 billion bytes. However, operating systems like Windows calculate 1GB as 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024^3 bytes), resulting in a lower displayed capacity.

For creating a Windows 11 recovery drive, a USB drive with a minimum capacity of 32GB is required. If your 32GB USB drive is showing only 28.8GB of available space, it may not be recognized by the recovery tool.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Format the USB drive: Try formatting the USB drive to NTFS or FAT32.

2. Use Disk Management or DiskPart: These built-in Windows tools can help delete all partitions on the USB drive and create a new single partition that utilizes the full capacity.

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Leon Pavesic
(LinkedIn)