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Surface Device that has a 1-TB drive configuration shows two drives

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This article helps resolve the issue in which a Surface device that has a 1-TB drive configuration shows two drives.

Applies to:   Surface Pro (5th Gen), Surface Laptop (1st Gen), Surface Pro 6, Surface Laptop 2
Original KB number:   4046105

Symptoms

You experience the following symptoms on some Surface devices that have the 1-TB drive configuration:

  • Diskpart shows two 512 GB drives instead of a single 1 TB drive.
  • Windows Explorer shows two 512 GB drives instead of single 1 TB drive.
  • A bare metal recovery (BMR) image states "There was a problem recovering your PC" or reports other errors when you try to restore the BMR image.

Surface devices that are impacted by this issue:

  • Surface Pro (5th gen) 1-TB drive configuration
  • Surface Laptop (1st Gen) 1-TB drive configuration
  • Surface Pro 6 1-TB drive configuration
  • Surface Laptop 2 1-TB drive configuration

The following Surface Devices with 1-TB drive configuration use a single SSD and aren't impacted by this issue：

  • Surface Pro 4
  • Surface Book
  • Surface Book 2
  • Surface Studio 2
  • Surface Pro 7
  • Surface Laptop 3

Cause

This issue occurs because some Surface Devices with 1-TB drive configuration use Storage Spaces technology to combine two 512-GB drives into a single drive. If you use older deployment or disk configuration tools that don't support the storage spaces, it can break a single storage-space drive into two separate drives.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, follow these steps:

  1. Download version 3.2.43 or a later version of the Surface Data Eraser tool.
  2. Create a Surface Data Eraser drive, and then start the device from that drive.

The Surface Data Eraser tool rejoins the two drives into a single storage-spaces drive. The BMR image can be downloaded and installed, or a custom image can be deployed.

Note

The image and deployment tools that are used must be based on the Windows 10, version 1703 (Spring Creators) update or a later Windows 10 update.