You can create a Lenovo recovery USB drive and restore or reinstall Windows when it’s not booting. Here’s how to do it.
If your Lenovo laptop is not booting, you can quickly use the Windows USB recovery to restore the system. However, if there are no recovery files, you cannot use the Windows Recovery mode. In those situations, you can create a Lenovo Recovery USB drive to recover or reinstall Windows. Let me show you how.
Before proceeding, make sure that you have your laptop serial number ready. You must verify your device and need the Lenovo serial number for that.
Generally, you can find the serial number at the bottom of the device or in the BIOS. Additionally, you should have an account with Lenovo. You can sign up while verifying your laptop if you don’t have one.
Steps to Create Lenovo USB Recovery Drive
Creating a recovery drive for your Lenovo laptop is relatively easy. In fact, Lenovo provides a simple first-party software called Digital Download Recovery Service (DDRS) to create a recovery USB drive.
However, this process is not instantaneous. You have to submit a digital download order. Once the order is submitted, Lenovo creates recovery files for your specific computer or laptop. Like I said before, have your Lenovo device serial number device ready. You are going to need it in a few steps.
- Head over to the Lenovo recovery page.
- Type your Lenovo laptop serial number.
- Click the “Go” button.
- Select your language and country.
- Choose the operating system.
- Agree to the terms and click “Next.”
- Sign in if prompted.
- Click the “Submit” button.
- Wait for the recovery files to create.
- Plug in a USB drive (16+ GB).
- Download the Lenovo USB recovery software.
- Double-click on the downloaded exe file.
- Click the “Download recovery files and create a recovery USB key” option.
- Sign in to your Lenovo account when prompted.
- Select the recovery files and click “Next.”
- Choose a download location.
- Click the “Download” button.
- After completing the download, choose the USB drive from the list.
- Click “Next” to continue.
- Click “Yes” to continue.
- Press “No, Exit” to finish the process.
- With that, you created the Lenovo USB recovery drive in Windows.
Steps with more details:
First, head to this page, enter your Lenovo laptop serial number and click the Go button.
Lenovo will verify your device serial number. If it is correct, you are shown additional options. Choose your country and language from the options. If prompted, select your Operating System and agree to the terms and conditions. Click the Next button.
Lenovo will prompt you to sign in to your account if you are not already signed in. You can also sign up for a new account directly from this page. Fill in the fields and click the Submit button.
Once you submit the order, Lenovo starts creating your digital download recovery USB files. It can take some time (around an hour or two) to complete the procedure.
After an hour or two, plug in a 16+ GB USB drive. Make sure that there is no important data in that drive. The recovery creation process will wipe the USB drive.
Now, download the Lenovo USB recovery software and double-click on it. Select the “Download Recovery Files and Create a Recovery USB Key” option on the main screen.
Sign in to your Lenovo account when prompted. Fill in the details and click the Sign In button.
You will see your digital download order in the list if it is ready and complete. Select the order and click the Next button.
Select a download location on this screen and click on the Download button. Make sure the download location has at least 20GB of free space.
Once the download is complete, select the USB drive from the drop-down menu and click the Next button.
If you see a USB Key Validated or USB partitions are created message, click the Yes button.
As soon as you click the Yes button, the Lenovo USB recovery creator starts the USB recovery creation process.
Once the USB drive has been created, click the Yes button if you want to delete all the downloaded files. If you’re going to keep the downloaded recovery files, click the “No, Exit” button to close the recovery software.
That is it. Just plug the USB recovery drive in your Lenovo laptop or computer and boot into it. Next, follow the wizard, and you should have your machine working in no time.
Using a Dell laptop, here are steps to create a Dell Recovery USB drive.
I hope this simple and easy Windows how-to guide helped you.
If you are stuck or need some help, comment below, and I will try to help as much as possible.
The Lenovo USB Recovery Creator is terrible. I have tried to create it on 3 different systems with 4 different USB drives and everytime it gets stuck at 11% in the copy phase. Left it for over 6 hours and it will not go beyond 11%. DO NOT BUY LENOVO!
Well, lenovo’s USB Recovery creator did download the files but when it create the usb recovery it, only copy the files to the usb, but it didn’t make the usb bootable, so the all process is useless, I did download and create a usb recovery for windows 10 from Microsoft website, but I want the usb recovery from Lenovo, it will be great idea to download one image file from Lenovo USB Recovery Creator instead a lot of files