How do I boot from usb with a Surface Pro 11?

Question

I own a surface pro 11, I've been trying to dual boot with a partition with windows 10 and windows 11 on it but its not working. What I mean is when I go to boot from USB, it just boots right back to windows 11. I purchased a 128Gb usb-c flash drive, formatted it to FAT32, used Media Device Manager to install windows 10 on it. I've tried everything I can find online, such as making it first in priority on the UEFI settings, taking off safety boot, booting directly from usb on UEFI by swiping left, force boot through usb on startup (Volume down + power button), Manually booting via advanced startup, but it does not work. To ensure it wasn't the USB I plugged it into my home pc and it instantly started the windows 10 startup when I booted through USB. There has to be something that is preventing my Surface Pro 11s BIOS from detecting the windows 10 startup. Can somebody please help since it seems there's no forms for this issue.

Answer 1

Hello Emerson,

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

Before I answer your question, let me share with you a support document from Microsoft:

Surface supported operating systems - Surface | Microsoft Learn

If you're currently using a Surface Pro 11 with a Snapdragon processor, that model only supports Windows 11.

In theory, the current mainstream Surface series devices support USB boot:

Boot Surface from a USB device - Microsoft Support

Note, however, that the Surface-specific USB drives covered in this article are different from the ones you mentioned in the thread.

You will first need to download a Surface dedicated recovery image with the serial number, and then follow the instructions to complete the creation of a dedicated USB recovery drive:

Creating and using a USB recovery drive for Surface - Microsoft Support ****

Only the USB recovery drive created in this way can be used to boot the Surface via USB.

But that's probably not possible, because the Surface Pro 11 doesn't have a Windows 10 version of the recovery image.

Therefore, your requirements may not be realized, Surface series devices, due to their particularity, only recognize the dedicated USB recovery drive created by special means, and the external USB drive created by the conventional process is not recognized.

Best Regards,

Mitchell | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

Answer 2

I wrote these up this morning as I wanted to dual boot my surface and could not find any published docs on how to do it,

RichShillingtonMSFT/surface-pro-11-dual-boot-instructions: These are instructions for configuring a Surface Pro 11 to dual boot Windows 11