Thing refused to boot up this morning, tried usual reset button pushes, then rushed for work so took it to PC World where I bought it. Person there said that Surfaces couldn’t be booted from a standard USB startup drive, it had to be a special one created from your own Surface before it borked itself, so it would have to go back to Microsoft and might well lose all data.

Sounded a bit off to me, but had to get to work so left it with them.

Now, looking at the Microsoft website, it looks as if I just need to log in, give them the serial number, and I can download a recovery image. Is that right?

Cheers 😉

The PC World fella will be talking about the recovery image that you can create in Windows.

I’m sure there will be an OS recovery tool somewhere that MS can provide and that will probably be an image.

The PC World fella was female, but she was adamant that the Surface couldn’t boot from a standard USB drive image the way normal PCs can.

But looks like I can just download one from here:

https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-gb/support/warranty-service-and-recovery/downloadablerecoveryimage?productId=100411422

brostoner says somethign like:

if you’ve got BitLocker enabled, then things do get a bit weird with using recovery disks. If not, then it’s just a normal pc and is fairly easily recovered.

Pfft, right, off to reclaim the damn thing before they do something stupid. BRB.

Yeah, I’d suspect she meant Bitlocker rather than the hardware. Pretty sure it doesn’t bitlocker by default, but I’m away from my office (with the Surface Pro 3)to confirm that.

So, for future reference, it is possible to download an image from Microsoft – the version depends on your model of Surface, but input your serial number and it works it out.

Couldn’t recover my installation with the image, so had to start again with a new installation, but all simple to do with the USB image.

v good.

My bro just got given one by a client, so will find that useful knowledge. Seeing him fr a beer in a tick, so will let him know. Glad you got sorted.