Windows 10 failed recovery - Surface Book

Hidaglio

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 12, 2000
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234
I have a Microsoft Surface Book that has to be about 5 years old at this point. It has been acting very sluggish lately so I decided that I would start fresh and do a wipe recovery. Well, lo and behold the recovery said it "failed and nothing was changed". That isn't the case because now the C: drive is completely gone. I tried to do a "recover from the cloud" which says no wireless networks were found even though I have another laptop sitting 2 ft away that is connected to the Wifi. I then tried to plug in an USB/ethernet adapter and hard wire directly into my cable modem to which it replies "an error occurred".

This is beyond frustrating, Microsoft's software won't even work on it's own hardware. Obviously the device is out of warranty and its $499 to open a support case with Microsoft. Do I basically just have a brick on my hands now?
 
Your not able to boot it from a USB installer, wipe what ever partitions are there and start fresh?
Think it was volume down and power ?
 
Your not able to boot it from a USB installer, wipe what ever partitions are there and start fresh?
Think it was volume down and power ?
I created a USB recovery drive and then rebooted to do a clean install. During the "resetting this PC" it said that it failed and rolled back and nothing was changed. Now if I unplug the drive and reboot it tries to go directly into the BIOS and asks for a password that I'm pretty sure I never set and of course don't remember.
 
I'd say you were serisously mislead at the point where you chose to buy a surface book. Nothing good ever came of such. I have a friend who made a similar mistake, he was fighting with frame freezes for years until he bought the Apple TV I originally recommended to him. After that he's been a happy camper.
It's been a great device so far. I draw a lot and being able to detatch the screen was a huge win for me. I was sad to see they got rid of that in the Surface Book 2.
 
I've found it easier to do a complete clean install from a regular Win 10 flash drive then to try their repair. Pretty sure some of our Surface Books are 2s and have detachable screens though.
 
I've found it easier to do a complete clean install from a regular Win 10 flash drive then to try their repair. Pretty sure some of our Surface Books are 2s and have detachable screens though.
My problem is the clean install fails. It just says "there was an error, no changes were made." Have you ever seen that?
 
That’s not a clean install. A clean install is formatting the partition and installing Windows. At no point are you using their recovery tool for a clean install.
Shoganai, this is great, thank you! I created an emergency recovery disk and chose the option to include system files so that I could do a clean install. I would rather do the procedure you mention but I assume I would need a windows 10 bootable DVD? What would be the process for keeping my current license key during this process?
 
Shoganai, this is great, thank you! I created an emergency recovery disk and chose the option to include system files so that I could do a clean install. I would rather do the procedure you mention but I assume I would need a windows 10 bootable DVD? What would be the process for keeping my current license key during this process?


The license key is embedded in your bios. Has been since they released Windows 8.

Also, Windows 10 will run FOREVER without activation (you just can't change things like your background or themes), so don't let that stop you.

Windows 10 is a lot better than previous OSes at maintaining itself, but eventually you'll have to Nuke From Orbit, Just to be Sure!
 
Can you borrow a PC and just use the Windows Media Creation Tool?
Unfortunately I can't, only other PCs in the house are macs. Also is the media creation tool different than the emergency recovery tool? I used that before trying to do a clean install and how I got into all this mess.
 
Unfortunately I can't, only other PCs in the house are macs. Also is the media creation tool different than the emergency recovery tool? I used that before trying to do a clean install and how I got into all this mess.
the media creation tool will make you new media, ie usb stick or dvd. the emergency recovery tool, is just that, a recovery tool. it tries to use the recovery partition if there is one or tries to repair the existing instal.
 
Yeh, my surface's had several partitions, I deleted all of them, then had the USB installer create its own, but youll have to find someone with a windows PC to create it
 
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