To PRO owners who are stuck on the UEFI settings screen and can't boot. FYI

[jomon]

I can confirm now that my issue is due to a drive failure.

I managed to "tricked" my bricked surface pro into booting into a recovery USB flash drive that I created from my Win 8 desktop. To boot to usb, press and hold the volume down button and release as soon as you see the Surface logo displayed on the screen. What I did was wait until the loading animation starts (the spinning circle appears) and remove the USB drive. After a couple minutes, a screen appears asking you to select a keyboard layout. After you make a selection, the diagnostics menu appear and from this menu, you have the option of running a refresh, reset, auto repair, command prompt, etc. I can confirm that my PRO is bricked due to a drive failure because when I attempted to do a refresh or reset, it said it could not access the primary partition. I went to the command prompt and sure enough, the c-drive or main partition is missing. Anyway, MS is shipping me a replacement which should arrive soon. What's worrying though is the number of users I've found online who reported the same issue with their PRO :-(

 

[Kiwibru]

Golly, what a grizzly story! Hope it doesn't become a mass failure in thousands of additional SSD units...I better boot my Pro...

 

[Cike]

I don't have another Win 8 PC, but I created a bootable USB from a Windows 7 system. Unfortunately, I don't get any different behavior when I start by holding down the volume button. It boots right into the security boot screen.