Fix Toshiba No HDD Recovery Area

If you have ever owned a Toshiba Desktop or Laptop you may be aware that preinstalled on your machine is the Toshiba Recovery Media Creator utility. This utility will enable you to create recovery media that is capable of re-imaging your system to factory settings. With all that said, if you go to create recovery media and get the error pictured below, look no further we have a possible solution. There are a number of reasons that could cause this error but usually it is related to the state of the existing recovery partition. First thing you need to do is verify that your machine has the Toshiba HDDRecovery partition by opening disk management console. This can be accomplished by clicking on the Windows Start button and typing diskmgmt.msc and then pressing enter. Once the disk management console is open, you will be looking for a large disk partition with no drive letter normally at the end of the disk as seen in the picture below. Of note here is that the partition is not marked as a “Recovery Partition” which is the root cause of the “No HDD Recovery Area” error. In order to fix the situation, we will need to run some commands using the Windows diskpart utility. First open up diskpart by clicking on the Windows Start button and typing diskpart.exe and then pressing enter. Once diskpart is open, run the following commands:

# lists all disk drives 
list disk
# select disk with recovery on it 
select disk 0
# lists all disk partitions
list partition
# select recovery partition  
select partition 3
# change partition type to recovery
set id=27 override

Once these commands are completed, if all went well you should now be able to open the Toshiba Recovery Media Creator utility without the “No HDD Recovery Area” error.