Chromebook Recovery Utility Stuck on Writing 0% completed, step 3

Chromebook Recovery Utility, Creating a recovery image, Writing. 0% completed.

Got the screen above, after the screen below?

Chrome OS is missing or damaged. Please insert a recovery USB stick or SD card.

To fix issues booting a Chromebook, you have to use the Chromebook Recovery Utility. Which as you can see by it’s 2/5 star rating, has some issues. The reviews reveal a similar problem to what’s described in the article. So yeah, it’s not just you, don’t worry! 😊

I popped in the USB flash drive, started the utility, started writing, and……. stuck! It was stuck on writing at 0% completed. What can we do about this?

After researching a bit, I found the solution. Here are my tips in order to successfully create a flash drive using the Chromebook Recovery Utility.

Chrome Recovery Utility Step-by-Step

1. Unplug your flash drive.
2. Shut down the computer. Really. Don’t restart it. Shut it completely off. This will ensure there are no weird USB driver / USB port / USB hub issues and allow the motherboard and OS to play nice together.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Plug in your flash drive.
5. Make sure your flash drive shows up in Device Manager. This ensures that your computer even recognizes your flash drive in the first place. Click start and type Device Manager or devmgmt.msc. You should see your flash drive listed under Disk Drives. You should see the manufacturer name or something similar.
6. Make sure the drive shows up in Disk Management. This ensures that your computer recognizes the drive as having the ability to contain partitions. Click Start and type Disk Management or open diskmgmt.msc. You should see the drive listed as one of the last entries at the bottom, along with its size.
7. Now let’s clean the drive information. Click Start, search for PowerShell, then right-click on it and click Run as Administrator.
8. Type diskpart and press enter.
9. Type list disk and press enter.
10. You should see a few disks here. In this context, disk means hard drive, solid state drive, flash drive, etc. We want to select the flash drive and NOT any other drive. The easiest way is to make sure the size matches. For example, my flash drive is 32 GB, so I’m choosing disk 2 here.

diskpart, list disk, before selecting a disk/drive

11. Select the disk by typing select disk X where X is the disk number. For example, I typed ‘ wh

whatever the Disk ### column shows for your drive.

WARNING: Be careful to NOT select your computer’s drive or your data drive. This following steps will erase EVERYTHING. ONLY select the flash drive. If you are paranoid and want to triple check, you can open another PowerShell window as Administrator and type Get-Disk and press enter which will return something like this…

Get-Disk PowerShell cmdlet

Note that the order of the disks is wrong here but that’s okay, it’s just a quirk of PowerShell. 😊 The number is what matters.

12. To confirm you have selected the right disk, type list disk again, press enter, and you should see your disk selected with an asterisk *.

diskpart, list disk showing selected disk

13. Cool so we’re on track. Now type the word clean and press enter.

14. If you did everything right, it will say it was successful. Here’s what your screen should look like.

diskpart cleaning USB flash drive for Chrome Recovery Utility

15. Now we can open Chrome (not Edge, not Brave, only Chrome, it’s picky, I know, ugh 😥).

16. Open the Chrome Recovery Utility.

17. After entering the model number and selecting the flash drive, click Show Advanced Settings, choose Stable, then click Create Now.

18.) Voilà! It should work!

If it doesn’t work and you are still stuck on step 3 writing at 0%, try the steps above starting at step 1. If you’re like me, you may have intentionally skipped a few steps because you didn’t think that mattered. Us IT people are often guilty of that. Haha! 🤣 But hey, the steps above are how I got it to work.

If you performed all of the steps above and are still stuck try opening the Guest profile in Chrome and running the utility. You may have to restart the computer again and then do it. You might also confirm you’re using the latest version of Chrome.

Chromebook Recovery Utility: Creating a recovery image

Chromebook Recovery Utility: Success! Your recovery media ready ready.

Boot to the flash drive

Now that the flash drive is created, simply plug it in to the USB port of your computer and turn it on. You may need to hold a Boot Key if your computer doesn’t pick up the flash drive right away.

See Google’s ChromeOS help page on this for more information.

Finally, you should see the following screens.

Chromebook screens after booting into recovery flash drive created by Chromebook Recovery Utility

Recommended Flash Drives

Below you’ll find some links to products and services to help you on your journey. I’ve built relationships with companies I trust, and earn a referral fee when you use them. There’s no additional cost to you, and you get service providers I’ve vetted to save you time and money.

I’m a big fan of SanDisk metal flash drives because of several reasons:

1. SanDisk has been around awhile, they’re an industry leader for flash memory products.
2. The metal is durable. Plastic flash drives can easily crack or pull off of your keychain or lanyard. These metal drives are solid.
3. If you use a flash drive on your keychain like I do, then if you forget your flash drive you can’t drive off without it! This makes for an easy reminder.

I personally use a SanDisk 256 GB Ultra Luxe USB 3.1 Gen 1 Flash Drive.

SanDisk 256GB Ultra Luxe USB 3.2 Gen 1 Flash Drive - SDCZ74-256G-GAM46

Although SanDisk is my favorite, for something more cost effective, I’ve also used several of these Vansuny flash drives with success. This is a Vansuny 3-pack of 32 GB USB 3.0 Metal Waterproof Flash Drives. At the time of writing this, the pack is less than $15 which is great for the price.

Vansuny 3 Pack 32GB USB Flash Drives USB 3.0 Metal Waterproof Flash Drive Ultra High Speed Memory…

Thanks for reading, I hoped this helped someone!