Term: recovery drive

In Windows, a recovery drive is a bootable disk, usually a USB flash drive, that contains tools used to diagnose and repair certain classes of problems, restore backup images or system restore points, or reinstall or repair Windows itself. See Create a Windows 10 Recovery Drive for an example of how to create one for Windows 10.

The term recovery drive is also often synonymous with “rescue disk” or “emergency disk” — generic terms typically used by back-up programs to describe similar items: bootable disks used to create or restore backup images.