Can't create recovery drive on this PC

Ray why are you being such an azz?

Really, Sandeep!  Aren't you people even embarrassed by offering "answers" that do not address the question posed?  This matter of an error message in creating a recovery drive is a very real problem.  Telling us what we already know is more than unhelpful, it's demoralizing. As a 30 years user of Microsoft products, my disappointment in Windows 8.1 - and the support people's cavalier disregard of legitimate queries - is acute.

It's not my type of Windows, because it was working fine in the past, at least before I cloned my HDD to a SSD. Since I couldn't boot afterwards I needed to use bootrec /rebuildbcd, so either the clone failed with respect to this or (as I suspect) Windows doesn't know where to look for the files.

i think its the type of Win 8 that u have that prevents u from doing this. You need the win 8 disc to make a recovery portion.

Is a fresh Windows 8 x64 (RTM) installation. Only thing that I can think of is it has UEFI and Secure Boot enabled.

I'm having the same problem on Windows 8 Pro x64 (fresh installed back a few months ago when it was released). However I've got an older motherboard so it doesn't use Secure Boot.

I was originally trying to boot into Safe Mode but couldn't find Troubleshoot in the advanced start up options, and eventually succeeded by using msconfig (I suspect that Troubleshoot being missing is a related problem). Once in Safe Mode I used the command sfc /scannow to repair Windows files, and it said it found and repaired some files, but it hasn't fixed either this problem or the missing Troubleshoot option.

Not sure what has gone wrong since it used to be running fine in the past, but I've had to manually turn the power off several times in the last few weeks because of Windows freezing, and that's not great for the system. I haven't tried reinstalling the system since apparently that may not fix the problem according to the posts in this thread.