Surface Recovery Key

[Dallas Themshirts]

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.

Select Create to download and create a USB key with the latest recovery image for a Surface device. Alternatively, if you have a previously downloaded recovery image, select Manage Existing.

On the Select Device screen, choose the specific Surface device that you wish to recover. The toolkit displays a list of managed devices and a dropdown menu for all supported devices. Select Next.

If creating a new recovery USB, select the base language and version of Windows for the recovery image. Options for Windows 10 and Windows 11, along with different feature updates like 21H2 and 22H2, are available. Select Next.

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.

A recovered drawing dropped the connection to a surface and its corridor, creating a definition by snapshot. The surface if used for numerous profiles. Recreating the surface profiles is a long process and undesirable. I've come at this a couple different ways and hit deadends. These are the routes I have looked at;

Reconnect the surface to the corridor - it appears impossible once a surface created from a corridor loses that link to reconnect it. It should be a simple attribute to add in the definition command but nope.

This last item is exactly what I was going to suggest. As long as you remove the snapshot from the definition (after pasting the good surface into it), the file size shouldn't be much, if at all, different than it was previously.

This is how I'm fixing the issue. So old surface lets call it surface1, is te surface with the broken link to the corridor and the snapshot from recovery. Then I created a new surface lets call it surface2 and pasted into the surface1, which makes surface1 and all the profiles connected to that surface work. Only downside is the file size.

Here's the strange part and this may be hard to follow. So I renamed surface1 to surface3 and surface2 to surface1. Everything is working fine, profiles all still work and the surfaces both work. Surface3 still with no real connection to the corridor, just surface1 pasted into it. Then after rebuilding the corridor and saving the drawing, I delete Surface3 in the surface tab of the corridor editor. And everything appears to be just like be for the recover created the snapshot and broke the connection between the surface1 and the corridor. Infact the whole drawing size reduce by almost 1/3. All the profiles work some how being remapped to the new surface. The file feels actually more stable. Audit shows no errors.

Either I did something wrong, or this is WAAAY more difficult than, say, planting a flag on Minmus which yielded more money and reputation. I think the reward for this recovery contract should probably be a lot higher.

When you start out, you don't even know what you will be recovering, you have to fly over and look. It turned out to be a Swivel engine standing upright in the middle of nowhere. So I flew there with a rocket that had a last stage consisting of a brown fuel tank, eight thuds near the top (to avoid blowing away the module), a claw at the bottom, and RCS thrusters. I first had to navigate to the precise location, come down, hover in the vicinity of the module, with the nose perfectly up (without mods like Mechjeb's SmartASS), then used RCS to move over the module. Positioning had to be extremely precise, this is much harder than docking because of the gravity. I viewed the rocket from such an angle that I could see the left/right position and height directly, and used the shadow on the ground to judge forward/aft. If I wasn't precisely above the thing before trying to pick it up, the claw wouldn't engage and the module would just fall over. In fact I almost gave up because I thought the claw would never pick up such an item. But finally it latched on after dozens of quickloads.

Then I had just enough fuel left over to make it into Mun orbit, so I launched a refueling mission to dock with the first one to refuel. Fortunately I had thought of including a docking port. Then I had to get the module back to Kerbin without burning it up on reentry. Used a very shallow reentry with retrograde burning keeping things just below overheat until I could deploy the chutes. I guess I could have transfered the engine to a different craft with the claw at the top and a heat shield at the bottom, or I could have started out with a heat shield at the top of my initial rocket, but anyway, I made it down in one piece.

Action group some 24-77s radial engines facing down just in front of the claw (the contract should tell you the mass of the item). Us those to lift the front of the rover-rocket up... then light the main engines... No need to claw it while hovering right over it.

Also, when you say brown tank, I'm guessing you are referring to the Rocko-max jumbo 64, which most people on these forums call an orange tank. It is an especially beloved tank... it was the largest tank prior to 0.23.5, and was a benchmark payload... still is actually. I've even see people on the forums use it as a standard for measuring fuel/fuel capacity... ie "Orange Tank Equivalents" or OTE. (so the largest kerbodyne tank is 2 OTEs, and the rockomax x200-16 is 0.25 OTE)

That's another way of doing it, indeed, but still a whole lot more work than landing on Minmus at a location of your choice and planting a flag. And if you're picking up the module using a rover, that rover will have to dock to some bigger ship to make it back to Kerbin and survive reentry.

I did a mission like this a few weeks ago, to retrieve a Mk3 monoprop tank. In addition to the difficulty of positioning a hovering claw above something, it was complicated by the fact that sometimes when I'd get within physics range, the part would suddenly fall through the ground.

I thought "pfff easy peasy" and accepted. Then I checked her orbit and realized it was clockwise. 180 "inclination" Around the sun. This is a 1-star mission and it was one of the first 20 missions I accepted. It's 5 years later now and I'm about to reach her in 145 days. Took me 15.000 m/s ΔV so far.

That really is an interesting mission. I wonder what would be the most efficient way of accomplishing it. Slingshot way out to somewhere around Eelo so you don't need so much delta-v to get to a standstill, plummet towards the sun and slingshot around one of the inner planets to a retrograde orbit? Then you're still nowhere near the stranded astronaut of course, but at least it will give you a big chunk of the required delta-v.

3a8082e126