BR16 PE recovery media - lessons learned after testing on four machines: Win10 machine purchased as Win10, Win8.1 machine purchased as Win8.1, Win8.1 on an original Win7 machine, and Win7 on an original Win7 machine. I describe these computers this way because of BIOS, UEFI and legacy options that can be rather challenging across the OSs.

Do not use a flash drive larger than 32GB. First, the recovery builder will create a 32GB partition on the flash drive and the recovery media will not boot, yielding the "Windows failed to start" error. Second, the process trashed my 64 GB flash drive. Even after following manufacturers directions for this exact circumstance, there is no recovery for the flash drive.

Before attempting to use the recovery flash drive, go into BIOS/UEFI and place USB hard drives at the top of the boot order list. The very top. If USB hard drives are not at the very top of the boot sequence, the recovery flash drive may be skipped and the machine will slide into Windows boot, even though the Windows boot manager is listed below USB hard drives.

Also in UEFI settings, secure boot can remain enabled, or it can be disabled. No difference. Enable legacy, and the UEFI recovery media was never recognized (even under UEFI) and hence the recovery media would not boot.

Then, as discovered on all four test computers, the Paragon UEFI recovery media -must- be selected in boot options at startup. Correct - without this step, the machines ignored boot order entirely and jumped directly into Windows boot.

Some flash drives simply do not work as Paragon recovery media. These problem flash drives might work as recovery media on some computers, but not on others. (By "not work", I mean explicitly that the UEFI flash drive would not be recognized by the system and therefore did not exist at boot time.) Once a good flash drive was found, it worked fine as recovery media on all test computers. The point here is a failed recovery flash drive may not be due to the system or due to the media builder per se - try several different flash drives for recovery media builds, and test them before putting them away.

One BR16 problem down, several to go... emailed logs, adding pre-existing Paragon images to the BR16 backup list, and editing backup job scripts.