Surface Pro 4 won't boot to USB

Anonymous
2016-07-10T08:39:13+00:00

I have tried every instruction method I have found online to get the surface to boot from USB.

The only requirement I have seen is the USB is formatted fat32 with I have verified.  

It was made with the recovery disk creator. 

Juat at can't get it to boot to it.

Surface | Surface Pro | Install and update

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Anonymous
2016-07-11T00:30:30+00:00

If you are trying to boot to the recovery usb flash drive using the 2 button power + volume down power up that may be your problem.  That procedure does not work on my sp4 i7 and may not work on any sp4s.

 Method to boot to Recovery usb

Make sure your sp4 is shutdown, insert your usb flash drive, then hold down the Volume UP button and tap the power button momentarily, as soon as the SURFACE logo appears release the Volume UP button.  This will bring you to the UEFI configuration screens.  Go to the Boot configuration screen and make sure the "Enable boot from usb devices" is checked and that USB Storage is selected(the box will be blackened if it is selected).  To boot the usb swipe your finger from the right to left on the "USB Storage" line.  Answer the following message to boot from that device and your sp4 should boot to recovery drive.  Your usb stick should be formatted as fat32 and the recovery image should be unzipped in  its entirety to the usb stick.  Rufus is not necessary if you formatted your flash drive on the sp4.

Note that I have used both 32gb and 16gb flash drives successfully. You do not have to disable Secure Boot.

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-05-12T07:40:05+00:00

    I had the same issue. I couldn't get the device booting for an MDT deployment at a customer. The customer only had non branded USB 2.0 sticks available for me. Whataver posible I had done but nothing is working.

    So I took some of my own sticks, ruffused it (GPT Fat 32 and LiteTouch64.iso file) and working instant. This stick is a SanDisk 32Gb USB 3 stick. Cloned that stick to the USB 2.0 stick but still nog working.

    My conclusion is that the Surface Book and Surface Pro are realy picky on what kind of USB stick it will accept.

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-03-27T13:11:35+00:00

    I forgot one additional note about Fedora during installation:

    When the disk management profile appears during installation, you need to wipe out all partitions (delete them) and reclaim space.

    After that, tell it to use the entire hard disk (SSD card in this case) and it will create its own partition scheme.

    Later, when you re-install Windows 10 back onto the machine, Windows will wipe out all partitions and re-create the original drive scheme.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-07-10T16:04:29+00:00

    Done that.  I have created 6 different ones.  All of witch can be boot to from a different PC. 

    Ine one thing is that the surface image you linked to is a zip file witch can't be used by Rufus directly.  To after Rufus I use the recovery drive creator and copy the files over from the zip as listed on MS website.  

    Not sure if this is correct.  But it does boot on other devices.

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  4. Barb Bowman 80,820 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2016-07-10T13:46:25+00:00

    try a different USB stick.

    __________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Barb

    MVP-Windows and Devices for IT

    My Blog - http://digitalmediaphile.com/

    Please mark as answered if this answers your question

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