Trying to image Surface Pro 13" 12th ed Intel with MDT

Hi Frank Bozynski,

To resolve this initialization failure, you need to download the official Surface Pro commercial driver pack from the Microsoft Download Center and extract it to your deployment server. Open an elevated command prompt and use the Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool to mount your boot.wim file from your deployment share to a local temporary folder. You will use the dism command with the Add-Driver switch to inject the entire extracted driver directory, which ensures the Intel graphics, serial IO, and specific Surface firmware drivers are integrated into the offline image alongside the storage and network drivers.

Once the drivers are successfully injected, you must use the dism command with the Unmount-Image and commit switches to save the changes to your boot image. Finally, navigate to the Windows Services console and restart the Windows Deployment Services service to clear the active TFTP cache. This guarantees that the target Surface Pro pulls the newly compiled boot image containing the necessary display drivers on its next network boot attempt, allowing the graphical PE environment to load so your task sequence can begin.

Hope this answer has brought you some useful information. If it did, please hit “accept answer”. Should you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

VPHAN

Frank Bozynski, you're right, when you update the deployment share and choose to completely regenerate the boot images, MDT actually runs those exact DISM commands in the background to mount the Windows PE image, inject the drivers, and package it back up. The reason you are still experiencing the black screen comes down to how MDT filters driver classes during that automated process.

By default, the Windows PE configuration in your deployment share properties is deliberately set to only inject network and mass storage drivers to keep the boot environment as lightweight as possible. Because the Intel Iris graphics and essential chipset components required to render the modern Surface display do not fall into those two strict categories, MDT purposefully skips them during the injection phase, even if they are sitting perfectly in your Out-of-Box Drivers folder.

To resolve this natively within the MDT console without using the command line, you will need to bypass that default filter. Create a dedicated folder under Out-of-Box Drivers specifically for your WinPE drivers and import the Surface Enterprise pack there. Next, create a new Selection Profile that points exclusively to this new folder. Finally, open your deployment share properties, navigate to the Windows PE tab, select your new profile, and change the driver injection behavior to include all drivers from the selection profile rather than just network and storage. Completely regenerate your boot images one more time, and the graphics drivers will successfully integrate.

Hope this helps :)

VPHAN