Surface Pro won’t boot from usb

bootmicrosoft-surfaceusb

I have had a surface pro for a while now and I have decided to try and boot from USB on it.
It won't boot from it.

I have tried an external hardrive with Windows Vista on, a Windows 98 Microsoft-dos boot disk and even a Windows repair disk on an external disk drive. All of these devices boot on everyone of my computers except my surface.

I have tried disabling secure boot keys in the BIOS and I have tried booting via Windows 8 advances options and by holding down the bottom volume rocker at start up. None of it works.

Best Answer

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2013/03/20/creating-bootable-usb-drive-for-uefi-computers.aspx

UEFI based systems such as the Surface Pro or other UEFI systems require that the boot files reside on FAT32 partition. If they are not FAT32 the system may not see the device as bootable.

Note Surface Pro only supports 64bit windows, so it's possible only a 64bit windows repair disk will work. Note the Windows USB/DVD Download Tool formats the drive with NTFS, instead use Rufus so you can format the drive with FAT32.

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