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Bought a refurbished Surface Pro 1 for school, trying to boot from USB. Nothing working.Please help!

JFazio

New Member
Hi! As said in the title, I bought a surface pro 1 refurbished off of amazon to use for school. It was probably an enterprise device as there are 2 areas that look different (stickers probably there), which is the only thing I can think of as why I can't boot from usb. I was trying to install OSX Yosemite (using a guide made by someone who has done it on a surface pro 1, so that's not the problem), and everytime I tried booting from USB nothing happened. I tried the volume down: power+volume down:volume down combo, the volume down: power+volume down combo, changed the bios settings, booting into advanced recovery from Windows 8.1, everything. I can't wrap my head around what isn't working. I even tried a windows install USB that wouldn't boot either. Please help this is killing me!
 

malberttoo

Well-Known Member
Hi! As said in the title, I bought a surface pro 1 refurbished off of amazon to use for school. It was probably an enterprise device as there are 2 areas that look different (stickers probably there), which is the only thing I can think of as why I can't boot from usb. I was trying to install OSX Yosemite (using a guide made by someone who has done it on a surface pro 1, so that's not the problem), and everytime I tried booting from USB nothing happened. I tried the volume down: power+volume down:volume down combo, the volume down: power+volume down combo, changed the bios settings, booting into advanced recovery from Windows 8.1, everything. I can't wrap my head around what isn't working. I even tried a windows install USB that wouldn't boot either. Please help this is killing me!

How is your USB formatted- FAT32? NTFS?
 

malberttoo

Well-Known Member
It's FAT32 (both of them)

Well that's good then, most UEFI will only see Fat32. If it was me I'd make sure the USB drive in question CAN boot up some other device, your other laptop etc. Make sure the drive actually works.

Beyond that I'm not sure what to say. You can download the official re-install image from Microsoft, and see if that works, just to actually see if the Surface is not completely hosed. The image worked on my SP3 once when it wouldn't boot to anything else.

https://www.microsoft.com/surface/e...ervice-and-recovery/downloadablerecoveryimage

Sorry I don't have anything better. Maybe someone else will.
 
OP
J

JFazio

New Member
Well that's good then, most UEFI will only see Fat32. If it was me I'd make sure the USB drive in question CAN boot up some other device, your other laptop etc. Make sure the drive actually works.

Beyond that I'm not sure what to say. You can download the official re-install image from Microsoft, and see if that works, just to actually see if the Surface is not completely hosed. The image worked on my SP3 once when it wouldn't boot to anything else.

https://www.microsoft.com/surface/e...ervice-and-recovery/downloadablerecoveryimage

Sorry I don't have anything better. Maybe someone else will.
Just tried the windows 10 one on my desktop, no problems... It hasn't been 30 days so I'm probably going to return it.

EDIT: It's been 31 days... GG WP
 

malberttoo

Well-Known Member
It's been 31 days... GG WP

Ouch!

Half the forum is on the other side of the planet sleeping right now, so I'd give it a bit, and see if some other people smarter than me have some ideas for you.

Do you have a USB optical drive?
 
OP
J

JFazio

New Member
Ouch!

Half the forum is on the other side of the planet sleeping right now, so I'd give it a bit, and see if some other people smarter than me have some ideas for you.

Do you have a USB optical drive?
No, but I was thinking about doing networked boot, but that requires the USB-Ethernet adapter. I'd rather not spend any money on my first world problems. Also, I guess the Mac OSX drive was being reformatted when I was installing it to the drive which is why it only showed 200mb on my windows machines. Even so, the SP won't even boot from the FAT32 windows 10 install drive that my desktop will. I guess I'll just wait until the morning and get some sleep.

EDIT: I'm just going to download the windows 10 stuff onto my surface and install that...Maybe then it will work
 
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