I reinstalled Windows a few days ago, this is their tool to create a bootable installation medium. After realizing how needlessly complicated it is to create a bootable installation medium for Windows without an existing installation of Windows to run this tool, I’ve then repeatedly run into this error. Now you might think, judging from the wording in that error message, that this is what it looks like right after starting it. But no, this message came – reproducibly – after:

• Ten to twenty seconds of “Getting some things ready”
• Clicking through some dialogs to start the process
• The tool downloading a 10GB Windows image
• The tool formatting the selected USB flash drive
• The tool copying the image to the flash drive until reaching about 80% progress
• The tool remounting the flash drive and progress dropping back to 50%
• The tool showing progress move back to about 78%

Only then, it finally failed. So… I’m pretty sure you could at least have some idea of “what happened”. And I’m pretty sure that you are able “to run this tool on my PC”, because it already ran five times. It didn’t finish, but it certainly ran, or where else did my time go?

Maybe at least tell me exactly what the last thing that did work was. Or even what you tried to do when something broke? Was it copying data? Was it unmounting the flash drive again? Maybe you could even tell me beforehand that remounting of the flash drive is a thing to expect. Because I don’t even know for sure that it is. Maybe the flash drive is faulty and that’s why the remounting happens and it’s already at that point that I could realize I simply need to use a different flash drive. I’ll never know.

Icing on the cake is that – of course – you can’t even copy the error message, including the cryptic error code. Why do they make it so hard for people to try and help themselves?