Recovery Drive formatting for Surface Pro 3

Question

I recently bought a refurbished Surface Pro 3. When turning on it continuously loops to the BIOS setup screen. I am currently trying to download a recovery drive onto a USB to run my device that way. When looking on Microsoft's website it states the format of the drive must be Fat32 in order to read it. The recovery file from Microsoft is ~5gb but Fat32 only accepts files up to 4gb! Is there any way around this/ are there any other formatting types is will accept to allow me to boot my surface from my USB???

Answer 1

That is incorrect for the limit.  You can go up to around 32GB in FAT32.

You need a 16GB or higher USB pendrive for the recovery and "YES", it will format in FAT32!

Answer 2

After doing more research I'm thinking that this is happening because I didn't put the extracted version onto the USB, I left it in the compressed zip state. If I extract if first and put those files on a folder in the USB should this work?

Answer 3

The best thing to do when you have the zip file on your regular PC is to first format the USB pendrive (to make sure) and by default, it will format in FAT32.

Next, double-click on that zip file and in the panel, you will see all the files within it.  Just go CTRL A to highlight all the files and CTRL C to copy and then navigate to the open panel within the USB pendrive and then go CTRL V to paste.  It will take a while.

When finished, remove the USB pendrive and make sure the tablet is OFF and insert the USB pendrive.  Make sure no micro-SD card is in the tablet (it confuses the machine) and hold down the VOLUME DOWN and at the same time, press and hold down the POWER buttons and keep them held down until you see "SURFACE" appear on the screen.

On the next screen, select USB for the boot option and then there may be another screen appear and select "Troubleshoot" and tell it then to recover from an external drive.  The recovery will begin then and leave the machine alone until it finishes.

When you start this process with the tablet and see a BIOS type screen asking about the bitlocker keys, just hit the ESC key to continue.

Answer 4

Thank you for the suppirt so far. It has finally got me out of the BIOS screen loop. I reset the surface but I cant get past the blue troubleshooting screen now every time i start it up and cant seem to be able to have it find my recovery device. Any input on this?

Answer 5

Try detaching the keyboard and try again.  If it doesn't work after that, the problem is most likely the USB pendrive itself.  Try to find a generic 16GB pendrive and stay away from the "name brands".