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Creating a Recovery Drive doesn't leave enough space to copy recovery image

Anonymous
2025-03-31T14:42:01+00:00

I am using the steps from the "Surface Recovery Image" article, but the recovery drive creation process automatically formats the drive into FAT32, limiting it to 32GB. After the recovery drive creation process is complete, there is not enough space left on the drive to copy the recovery image files onto it. This makes me unable to finish creating a usable recovery drive.

Surface | Surface Laptop | Install and update

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-04-01T09:08:46+00:00

    Hi Alex, 

    Welcome to Microsoft Community. It sounds like you're running into a common issue when creating a recovery drive for your Surface device, where the default FAT32 formatting imposes a 32GB size limit, leaving insufficient space for the recovery image files. Here's how to ensure the USB device is properly formatted as a bootable drive:

    1. Insert a USB drive into your Surface. (The USB drive should be at least 16 GB.)
    2. Open a Command Prompt window as an administrator. (To do this, right-click Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.)
    3. In the Command Prompt window, enter diskpart, and then press Enter.
    4. To determine the drive number or letter of the USB drive, at the command prompt, enter list disk, and press Enter. 
       
      The list disk command displays all the disks on the computer. Note the drive number or drive letter of the USB drive.
    5. At the command prompt, enter select disk X (where X is the drive number or drive letter of the USB drive that you noted in the last step), and press Enter.
    6. Enter clean, and press Enter. This will delete all data from the USB drive.
    7. To create a new primary partition on the USB drive, enter create part pri, and press Enter.
    8. To select the partition that you just created, enter select part 1, and press Enter.
    9. To format the partition, enter format fs=fat32 quick, and press Enter.
    10. Enter active, and press Enter.
    11. Enter exit, and press Enter.
    12. When you have the operating system image that you want to boot to, save it to the root of the USB drive.

    Boot Surface from a USB device - Microsoft Support

    If these steps don't resolve the issue, please use another USB drive, smaller than 32GB to see if this problem still occurs. If there is anything not clear, please do not hesitate to let me know.

    Your Sincerely Hahn. W - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

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