Recovery media error: failed to change disk layout

[dipitroguc]

Dear,

When I try to create recovery media on a WD Elements 1TB harddisk, I get an error that reads:

'Preparing USB disk Error: Failed to change disk layout'.

It's a brand new hard drive and I'm logged on a Windows Server 2012 R2 with Administrator priviliges.


Ps. I'm sorry I don't have a support case ID, but the internet told me that my question would most likely be answered in this forum.

[Dima P.]

dipitroguc,

Can you format this drive via native Windows tools (i.e. disk manager) and then run recovery media creation again? Thanks.

[Mike Resseler]

As an addition to Dima's response

It is possible that you will get an error even after that. In that case diskpart will be able to help you:

Code: Select all

diskpart
list disk
select disk #
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format quick fs=fat32 (or other)
assign
exit

However, don't run this step by step because it will completely wipe your 1TB usb disk so you might want to create different partitions first and so on...
This is not uncommon what you see as many of those vendors "prepare" the drive which makes it impossible for others to make it bootable. Considering many of these devices are bought by end-users, it is actually not even a bad idea

[dipitroguc]

Thank you Dima and Mike!

I had already tried the disk manager format and I still had an error after that, like Mike said could happen.
So I tried diskpart and it worked!
Now I'm just wondering for the reason behind this.
Is the cleaning function of diskpart more thorough than disk manager? Is it the fact that I didn't make the partition active in disk manager?

[Mike Resseler]

To say it very simple... Disk manager prohibits you from making actions that are irreversible. Diskpart doesn't, so the clean option cleans everything from that disk without being able to revert. Disk manager will not do that.

[dipitroguc]

Thanks again!