Windows 10 Media Creation Tool Error: 0x80042405 - 0xA001A

Greetings,

Recently, I have seen many people inquiring about this error regarding the Media Creation Tool. I myself got this error when I try to create a bootable USB drive (aka Create an Installable Media).

Here's what I tried:

Reformatting USB drive to FAT32

Deleting files

Tried to locate and run Setupprep.exe (I couldn't find this file in C:\$Windows.~BT\Sources or anywhere)

Change Startup Type of Update-Related Services (Startup Type: Manual -> Automatic)

Uninstalled and Reinstall Windows 10 Media Creation Tool

Made sure my USB is above 8Gb as instructed by the tool (it is 15Gb)

The Fix (for me at least):

1. Downloadthe Windows 10 Media Creation Tool directlyinto the USB drive that you want to use as a bootable device (meaning you download the Tool into the same USB you chose to use as an Installation Media). If you already downloaded the tool on your PC's Desktop, copy it into your USB.

2. Run the Tool directly from your USB, meaning you open File Explorer, locate the MediaCreationTool.exe in your USB and double-click to run it.

The installer should then create an Installation Media/Bootable USB.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Tom

I tried Tom's suggestion, certain that it wouldn't work...….and then it DID!  Thanks for the recommendation.

It didn't change anything in my case, booting from DVD, booting from ISO loaded to bootable USB, from the media creation tool for 8.1 and 10, over countless different usb drives.  It also then wouldn't install Linux due to I/O errors so then tried a memory test and the RAM was showing large numbers of errors and was probably the cause. 

Never had an issue with the bootable media creation tool before and just couldn't work out what was going on with it on this particular laptop.

Tried a bunch of different combinations with no luck, then finally got it to work with the following:

1. Remove usb drive partition, format as NTFS and do full format (NOT QUICK FORMAT. This takes forever but seemed necessary, as others have said).
2. Download Media Creation tool directly to USB drive.
3. Disable MS Defender.
4. Delete contents of Windows\SoftwareDistribution folder.
5. Delete the $Windows temporary folders in C:.
6. Run Media Creation Tool as Administrator.

Highly recommend you do ALL of this before giving up, even if it doesn't make any sense.

JKrinsky,

Why go to all that trouble when just copying the tool to the flash drive and running it from there fixes the problem.  That it is an effective work around has been established by a number of thread participants. Did you try it yet?

JKrinsky,

Why go to all that trouble when just copying the tool to the flash drive and running it from there fixes the problem.  That it is an effective work around has been established by a number of thread participants. Did you try it yet?

Hi Steve,

Yes, I did try that first (actually second or third). Looks like people are having mixed results with the basic fix, can't say how much of it is user error... Note that some people are having success using these other steps while NOT running the tool from the flash drive, so it's not just that silver bullet.

My post was an attempt to combine nearly all of the "fixes" reported to work into one list, which is what I finally did in order to make this piece of doodoo work. I didn't have time to go through all permutations and figure out which ones were actually necessary in my case.

Best regards,

Jamin