Usb Recovery Image For Surface

[Jonelle Rycroft]

Thiswas exactly what I was looking for and was a great solution. The only thing I would add is that a few weird things happen when you go to copy over the Surface Book recovery/boot image files to the flash drive:

I was nervous that there was something inherent in the files/folder structure that I would mess up by deleting what was on the existing recovery disk, or that it would only overwrite files that it needed to and some existing files would stay and cause issues. To get around this, I opened the folders that were there and cleared their contents, then copied the files over from the folders that matched in the Surface Book recovery files.

MiniTool OEM program enable partners like hardware / software vendors and relative technical service providers to embed MiniTool software with their own products to add value to their products or services and expand their market.

The system image is an important file stored on a dedicated recovery partition to restore or reset your computer. The recovery image can be used as a restore point for your system. If your computer runs into problems like partition loss or system crash, the recovery image can help you revert the OS to its normal state.

More important thing is to make sure that the USB drive should be formatted to FAT32. When it comes to formatting a USB drive, the Windows Disk Management or Diskpart tool may be your first choice. However, both the two tools have limitations in formatting a USB drive larger than 32 GB.

To format the USB drive quickly and effectively, we highly recommend you use a professional disk management tool like MiniTool Partition Wizard. It is a multifunctional partition manager that can format a USB drive to FAT32/NTFS/exFAT/Ext/Linux Swap with a few clicks. Moreover, this tool boasts many other powerful features like converting NTFS to FAT32 without data loss, converting MBR to GPT, extending partition, measuring disk, etc.

Step 1. Launch the MiniTool program to enter its main interface, select the USB drive from the disk map and click on Format Partition from the left action panel. Also, you can right-click the USB drive and select Format.

Step 1. Make sure that your Surface is turned on and plugged in, and insert the USB drive into the ports before you start creating the Surface Pro recovery image. If possible, we recommend you use a USB 3.0 drive.

Step 4. Wait for the tool to detect your USB drive automatically. Once detected, select the USB drive and click on Next > Create. This process will copy many files/folders into the recovery drive, so you may need to wait for a while.

Once done, make sure you Safely eject the USB drive from the taskbar. Then you can boot your Surface from the USB recovery drive and perform a reset/refresh of your system with the image.

Sometimes you may need to reset or restore your Surface to the factory settings when the system is not working properly. How to reset the Surface using the USB recovery drive? Here are detailed steps:

Warning: Resetting the Surface will delete all personal files, and remove all apps and settings. Before you start, make sure you have backed up the product keys, and installation files of your desktop apps like Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project, and Visio so that you can reinstall them after the reset.

Step 6. You can select either Just remove my files or Fully clean the drive. The former option will refresh but keep your PC, while the latter will recycle your Surface and may take hours to complete.

In this case, you need to enable the boot-from-USB option from the Surface BIOS or set the USB recovery drive as the first boot option. Here we will show you how to set the USB as the first boot order.

Where to download Surface recovery images? How to create a Surface recovery USB drive and use it to reset the Surface? All these answers have been illustrated in the given post. In addition, we also provide solutions to fix the Surface recovery USB drive not working issue.

If you have any other questions about the Microsoft Surface recovery image topic, please leave them down in the comment area. Well, you can send us an email via [email protected] when you have difficulty formatting the USB drive with MiniTool Partition Wizard.

Why, the drive's serial number will be different, you can't expect a Real OS to work properly when that happens. This is a precision instrument we are talking about here, a delicate balance of code and hardware, not some loutish OS that can just be expected to work after being brutally sector-copied.

Disagree (somewhat) -- I've done it a million times. But you're right that it does take a meticulous effort to correctly replicate all disk ids info, mac address, partition tables, UEFI parameters, etc. Best to start by yanking out the SSD to clone and clone it (bit-for-bit) using dd under Linux on another machine.

Exactly. That what any experienced user/sysadmin would do because we've all been burned when the OS needs some obscure hex ID buried somewhere in the partition table, or MAC address that's not copied. (See Sysinternals and the various blogs from the great Mark Russinovitch for gory details.) Common, TheRegister, you know better than this. Stop pandering for clicks with this ridiculous FUD.

Gee, the Elite X has been out a whole 2 days and it doesn't work flawlessly? What wrong with these clowns at Qualcomm, Samsung, Asus, Microsoft, etc.? I'm sure the geniuses who are complaining about lack of backup media, problems with this or that game, etc., would have done a much better chip design.

No, Microsoft should have ensured that the recovery image creation tool they shipped with the device actually worked, rather than being so badly borked that it's now left one of their early adopters with a brick...

You might be happy to use random third-party tools for stuff like this, but if there's a OS-provided alternative that *ought* to also let you do the same job, it's not unreasonable to presume that many people would opt for the latter instead.

Every time this question is asked here, I think to myself "Surely there must be some community-maintained online database of Linux on various models of laptop". After all. It would be in keeping with the OS ethos of making your discoveries available to others.

It might be that even Penguins want an easy life, and usually buy a laptop that comes with Linux pre installed and is supported by the vendor, rather than go it alone installing Linux on a laptop that shipped with Windows.

It might be that tech reviewers, who have a stream new laptops pass through their hands, do test them with Linux, and thus reduce the need for a community-run database. Certainly wired.com claim to test Linux on all laptops they test, but the results are the property of wired.com and not open source.

Non-Linux users seem to have a lot in common with permies. Lacking the self-confidence giving it (Linux or freelancing as the case may be) a try, when they come here they carp about it being too complicated, immoral or whatever excuse they can come up with for lacking initiative.

In fact it's easy enough to download a live image and test ot from USB although personally I'd assume that where there own H/W is concerned Microsoft will throw as many roadblocks as possible in the way and not waste my money trying.

There certainly used to be a database of Linux on various laptop models, I should know as I maintained pages for two such laptops, an HP and Sony each of some flavour that I've since forgotten and no longer own.

Hence the cunning plan from Microsoft: the only way to get a vanilla Windows to run another trial Linux install is to buy another device. Microsoft won't actually stop you trying to get Linux on it asap, and help others do the same, but you have to pay dearly to do so.

A couple of weeks ago I thought I would give it another try. I have been running mint, having spent several hours making the damn thing "usable" on a touch screen. I still can't right click without using the touchpad*, and don't get me started on the terrible battery life... And the really good audio I had before has turned in to the stereotype of crappy laptop speakers. I was actually planning to revert back to windows this weekend.

*Yes there is a "turn long click in to right click", but no "only the the touchscreen and not the touchpad". And I couldn't figure out how to adjust the sensitivity for tapping the screen being detected as a click instead of a click and drag half of the time...

"Hindsight is the best known science to man". I always clone AND image a new computer before doing anything (which is usually install Linux on it!). I suppose, though, to be fair, the "excitement" having a new PC, can make any of us get carried away, and then caught out by Microsoft's slack attitude to customers. I'd just send it back with a terse note. My sympathies to those who have borked the machines.

Another "you'd think" point, but you'd think a user confident/capable enough to be swapping SSDs would also be able to get Device IDs from Device Manager and get OEM drivers if MS haven't published specific ones yet. Only possible issue would be the AHCI driver for the storage controller (not an issue anyway as this is an SSD), but that's nothing like the problem it used to be in the XP days ("fond" memories of trying to slipstream in drivers, then giving up and turning off AHCI)

It's a lot easier now than it was, in the days I referenced when XP was king floppy disk drives were largely obsolete, but the support wasn't there for accessing a USB drive during installation. There WAS support for USB floppy disk drives, but a very limited number of them were on the compatibility list.

Most enterprises used an image based install, but turning off AHCI was a very common fix when I worked at a particular large OEM in 2006 or so, particularly when new models came out with new chipsets. XP also had fairly limited hardware support natively, so people often couldn't get online to get drivers for their NICs or graphics cards etc.

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