Weird one - USB drives borked by Windows Media Creation Tool

Weird one - USB drives borked by Windows Media Creation Tool

Author
Discussion

Whoozit

Original Poster:

3,840 posts

281 months

Saturday 1st March
quotequote all
Using a Win10 machine to try and create a WMC Win11 install USB drive.

The creation process stalls at 50% then fails. Weirdly, the USB drive then disappears from windows, including from Diskpart. It's visible in Control Panel - Devices, but nowhere else. It's borked, basically. Happened twice identically with two very different devices.

Any bright ideas to recover the drives?

dogbucket

1,231 posts

213 months

Saturday 1st March
quotequote all
I dont know about your USB drives, but I normally download the Windows iso then write it using Rufus. This has the advantage of removing Windows 11 hardware requirements and allowing local user accounts during installation.

Whoozit

Original Poster:

3,840 posts

281 months

Saturday 1st March
quotequote all
dogbucket said:
I dont know about your USB drives, but I normally download the Windows iso then write it using Rufus. This has the advantage of removing Windows 11 hardware requirements and allowing local user accounts during installation.
That may be something I try with this win10 machine as it doesn't meet the hardware requirements. However in this case I'm doing a fresh install of Win11 on a new machine.

colin79666

2,044 posts

125 months

Saturday 1st March
quotequote all
With diskpart are you doing list disk or list volume?
It should still show up under list disk, then select disk # and then clean to bring it back. If it doesn’t show up in disk part then surely it can’t be showing in device manager as storage either.

Whoozit

Original Poster:

3,840 posts

281 months

Saturday 1st March
quotequote all
colin79666 said:
With diskpart are you doing list disk or list volume?
It should still show up under list disk, then select disk # and then clean to bring it back. If it doesn’t show up in disk part then surely it can’t be showing in device manager as storage either.
List disk. One of them eventually appeared in diskpart, and could be recovered. However the same thing happened again.

For the avoidance of doubt I've also tried in a Win11 machine, and got the same. Possibly I've either got some nastiness which is getting around Bitdefender, or I'm very unlucky with my external drives today.

anonymoususer

6,938 posts

60 months

Monday 3rd March
quotequote all
Are your USB drives the size they claim to be ?
There are still shady drives being sold that state they are say 8/16/32/64 etc but in reality are much smaller.

Whoozit

Original Poster:

3,840 posts

281 months

Monday 3rd March
quotequote all
anonymoususer said:
Are your USB drives the size they claim to be ?
There are still shady drives being sold that state they are say 8/16/32/64 etc but in reality are much smaller.
Yup, all the genuine article. Out of a Sandisk SSD, Sandisk USB, and an old Freecom HDD, I got the second two back. The most expensive has however gone in the bin