Surface Rt Recovery Mode

[Laura N Gerard]

Forgotthe password to sign in to your Surface tablet? Want to reset your computer to factory setting thus you can regain the access? If you want to perform a hard reset after forgot your Surface password, read on. This article describes 2 ways to reset your Surface to factory settings when locked.

Step 1: Go to the Surface support website. Select the Surface device and type your Surface's serial number. Click Continue. By default, the serial number was printed on the back of your tablet. You can also find it in the UEFI firmware.

Step 3: Turn on your Surface tablet and insert the recovery USB drive. Press and hold the Volume down button and press the Power button to boot your tablet from USB drive. As soon as the Surface logo appears, release the Volume down button.

Step 4: Surface will boot into the recovery mode. Choose your language and keyboard layout, and then at the Choose an option screen, choose Troubleshoot, then Reset your PC. You can choose to factory reset Surface with or without keeping all your files and apps.

The Microsoft Surface factory reset also refers to a hard reset and it offers you a choice to reset this PC and keep your files, but this is not guaranteed. Thus, to keep your data safe, it is best to create an exact copy of your files. If there are any losess, you can restore files from backup easily and quickly.

To backup files, free backup software like AOMEI Backupper Standard is indispensable. With it, you can easily backup files or folders on your PC as long as you can find it and save it to external hard drive, USB, network or NAS device, cloud drive like OneDrive, etc.

The factory reset contains the operation to delete files if you choose to remove everything and data loss can also be caused by insufficient power. So before resetting your PC, please connect your computer to the power cable.

If your Surface still can boot into Windows, try the official method to reset your PC. The way to access this feature in different systems may be different. Here we summarize this in for common operating system.

After accessing the Reset this PC feature, you will be asked to keep your files or remove everything. Please follow the steps bew to complete this process. Here take Windows 11 as an example and the steps in Windows 8.1 or 11 are similar. If you use Windows 7 system, you need to create a Windows 7 recovery disk and recover from it.

Step 3. Select Just remove my files or Fully clean the drive. Select the previous option if you are keeping your PC. If not or if it has a serious problem, select the second choice.

Step 4. It will start to scan your files and tell you what will be removed in the following. Click Reset to factory reset Microsoft Surface and it can be a Microsoft Pro, Go, Book, etc.

You may forget the login password sometimes, in this case, you cannot use the official way to factory reset Surface Pro 8, 7, 6, 4, 3, 2 or other series. Instead, you can restart to the recovery environment on the login screen.

Step 1. Start your Surface Pro or other series and access the Windows login screen. Then, click the Power icon in the lower right, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and click the Restart option.

Step 2. Your Surface will restart to the recovery environment and you will see a blue Choose an option window. Click Troubleshoot and then Reset your PC.

If you enable Bitlocker encryption in Windows 10 or 11, the recovery key is required to reset a PC. Otherwise, you cannot reset Surface Pro 8, 7, 6, 4, etc, or other series. Instead, if you know your Microsoft account credentials or the device model and its serial number, you can download the recovery drive to a local drive.

Step 2. The recovery image is a zip file. So you cannot save it directly into a USB flash drive. Please click Download recovery image and save it to a local drive. Then, extract the contents of it to the root directory of your USB drive. It will display as below:

Step 3. Turn off your Surface Pro and insert the recovery USB drive. Press and hold the volume down button and Power button. Release your volume down button when you see the Surface logo. It will go to the recovery environment, select Troubleshoot and Reset Your PC. Then, follow the on-screen instructions to complete the reset process.

It is worth mentioning that data protection is not only needed before major changes to prevent data loss during the process but also afterward. So you can restore files from backup at any time if you find some files are deleted or damaged.

I'm trying to help a friend with a Surface 2. Originally the issue he was having was that it would not power on even when plugged in. For some reason that started working fine and he was able to use it. It had sat idle for some time so he decided to catch up on Windows updates of which there were a fair amount. In the morning when he turned the Surface on he gets the Surface logo, then the spinning circle as if it's about to load but what he ends up with is a black screen. And ever so often. the system tray icon for wifi flashes a little but it's over on the left side of the screen and not at the bottom but a little higher up. Once in a while he gets a cursor with a spinning circle that disappears rather quickly. He has no important data so I downloaded the recovery image for this model from Microsoft and followed their instructions to create a USB recovery key so I could just restore it back to square one. I formatted the drive for FAT32 as they said. I follow their instructions to boot from the flash drive but it never does. I just keep getting the same black desktop and occasional flashing icon. The system had 8.1 on it still.

Thanks for the response and the link. I'll give it a try. I'll track down the instructions I used to make the recovery drive and post them to show you but I definitely do not recall some of these steps being in there and that may make the difference. The instrucions I found (which I believe were Microsoft) simply said download the image, make sure the USB drive is formatted for FAT32 and extract the image to the drive.

You may be right, (I don't own a Surface tablet, so I don't know) but the OP did state that it was tried first by just copying the files to a USB and it didn't work. It didn't recover from the USB. Whereas when the USB was made 'bootable' as is described in the "link" above for the Surface 2 recovery procedure from Microsoft, it did work successfully.

Summary: This article guides you through how to get around the BitLocker recovery screen on your Surface tablet. You will also learn how to find the BitLocker Recovery key, disable the BitLocker recovery screen on Surface, and reset Surface Pro without the Recovery Key.

When you start up your Windows Surface tablet, it shows a blue screen asking you to enter the BitLocker Recovery key for this drive. Even after you enter the BitLocker Recovery key for the Surface's boot drive, you are locked out of the Surface tablet again the next time you boot it up.

If you remember what you did before the appearance of the BitLocker recovery screen, revert that change to bypass the blue screen boot loop. If you don't remember, try the following steps to get past the BitLocker recovery screen on Surface Pro.

When your Surface Pro 3 or later is first turned on and you choose to log in with a Microsoft account, BitLocker is enabled by default. The recovery key is generated and uploaded to the OneDrive of your Microsoft account. The recovery key won't be deleted without an explicit user command. So you can use an Internet-enabled device and log into your Microsoft account to find the BitLocker recovery key.

3. If you have more than one BitLocker-encrypted drive, you have to identify the Surface boot drive using the Key ID shown in the BitLocker Recovery screen and find the required BitLocker recovery key.

Note: C: is the startup volume. If you have multiple BitLocker-encrypted volumes on your startup drive and you don't know which volume is the startup volume, use "manage-bde -status" command to show the BitLocker recovery status and identify the volume letter.

If you can get into your Surface tablet after entering the BitLocker recovery key, you can turn off the BitLocker encryption on the boot drive. In this way, BitLocker will not enter the recovery mode asking for the BitLocker recovery key.

If the recovery key is unavailable and your Surface device gets stuck on the BitLocker recovery screen, it is impossible to unlock BitLocker. In this case, you have to reset the Surface device by formatting the encrypted drive and reinstalling a fresh copy of Windows. It is important to note that resetting the Surface will wipe out everything on the device.

Step 1. On a working computer, visit this webpage, select the device that you need a recovery image for, and download the recovery image for your Surface. Save the file in a location you will be able to find it.

iBoysoft Data Recovery WinPE bootable media is one of the few solutions that allows you to create a BitLocker recovery boot disk and recover data from a BitLocker-encrypted boot drive when you can't enter the Windows operating system. Then the boot disk lets you boot your Surface or PC and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery. You can use the BitLocker Recovery module to scan the boot drive and retrieve recoverable files.

There are different reasons why your Surface Pro is displaying a BitLocker recovery screen each time it boots. This article offers steps and tips on how to bypass the BitLocker Recovery screen, whether you have your Surface Pro BitLocker recovery key or not.

To obtain the BitLocker recovery key from a refurbished Microsoft Surface device, you may need to contact the previous owner who has the BitLocker recovery key saved. If you are unable to retrieve the recovery key, reset this refurbished Surface to completely remove BitLocker encryption.

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