Hi all, I'm trying to prepare my USB stick to serve as rescue media, but I found the instructions here didn't work: https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW72/Preparing+a+USB+stick+for+Windows+PE

create par primary gave me a Virtual Disk Service error: There is not enough usable space for this operation.

Tried running the FAT32 format command, got, "There is no volume selected".

So... I'm running Macrium Reflect 7.2 on a Samsung Notebook laptop, tried to format a 32 GB SanDisk USB (new, never been been formatted).

Any ideas?

Thanks! Madeline

If you're running Reflect 7.2, you shouldn't need to do any of that manual prep.  Just open the Create Rescue Media wizard, select that flash drive (by its device name, no need to worry about any particular drive letter), and click Build. Reflect will sort out the rest, and if it has to format your flash drive to do that properly, you'll be warned about that beforehand.  If for some reason that fails and you want to follow those manual prep steps, before that "create par primary" command, you need to run the "clean" command.  Make sure you see a confirmation that the clean command actually succeeded. If you see an error, try simply running it again.  That command marks the entire volume as unallocated, and if that isn't done, i.e. a partition still exists on the flash drive, then the "create par primary" command will fail because there won't be any unallocated space for the new partition you're trying to create -- which is likely why you're seeing the message you are.  Each command in that sequence relies on the previous command having completed successfully.  If one of them fails, the next one very likely will too.  As an alternative, if you've already got a partition created on the flash drive, i.e. a volume with a drive letter appears in This PC when you connect it, then you can skip those steps in diskpart and instead just format that volume by right-clicking it in Windows and clicking Format.  Select FAT32 as the file system and also check the Quick Format option.  Then go to Reflect to use the Create Rescue Media wizard.

Lastly, just as an fyi for next time, you posted this in the Reflect V6 section of the forum even though you're apparently on V7.

+x

 

jphughan - 27 May 2019 2:36 AM

If you're running Reflect 7.2, you shouldn't need to do any of that manual prep.  Just open the Create Rescue Media wizard, select that flash drive (by its device name, no need to worry about any particular drive letter), and click Build. Reflect will sort out the rest, and if it has to format your flash drive to do that properly, you'll be warned about that beforehand.  If for some reason that fails and you want to follow those manual prep steps, before that "create par primary" command, you need to run the "clean" command.  Make sure you see a confirmation that the clean command actually succeeded. If you see an error, try simply running it again.  That command marks the entire volume as unallocated, and if that isn't done, i.e. a partition still exists on the flash drive, then the "create par primary" command will fail because there won't be any unallocated space for the new partition you're trying to create -- which is likely why you're seeing the message you are.  Each command in that sequence relies on the previous command having completed successfully.  If one of them fails, the next one very likely will too.  As an alternative, if you've already got a partition created on the flash drive, i.e. a volume with a drive letter appears in This PC when you connect it, then you can skip those steps in diskpart and instead just format that volume by right-clicking it in Windows and clicking Format.  Select FAT32 as the file system and also check the Quick Format option.  Then go to Reflect to use the Create Rescue Media wizard.

Lastly, just as an fyi for next time, you posted this in the Reflect V6 section of the forum even though you're apparently on V7.

Thanks so much! Sorry I posted in the wrong section of the forum. (I'm new here and didn't even realize it was divided by release.) Yeah, after I posted I thought I'd just try the Create wizard, see if it might actually work after all, and it did. I just got confused by the Macrium documentation saying that I needed to format the USB manually.

Happy to help! Glad you’re sorted. The documentation is there primarily because in Reflect 7.1 and earlier, the Rescue Media wizard was “non-destructive”, which meant it would never format a flash drive, just as a precaution against destroying other data that the user might have on the drive. The downside to that design was that in some cases, the manual prep outlined in the guide you linked had to be performed before the wizard could create usable Rescue Media on the drive. With Reflect 7.2, Macrium allowed the wizard to destructively format the flash drive if needed, with a warning to the user beforehand.

If you haven’t already, make sure you also test boot your system from your new Rescue Media. If you’ve done it correctly, your system should boot straight into Reflect instead of Windows. And then verify that the Rescue environment can see both the location containing your backups (external hard drive, network share, whatever) and also any disk(s) that you might want to restore those backups onto. If so, then you’re all set!