asked on

Surface Pro 4 only boots to “Surface UEFI”

Hi - I have a surface pro 4, that ONLY boots to the “surface UEFI” screen, and I can’t get past it. I’ve seen suggestions to disable secure boot, but that change hasn’t helped. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Cliff Galiher

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

William Fulks

We had some issues with a couple of Surfaces getting hung up and this worked for us. It's a solution from Microsoft where you force a hard reboot of it.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro4-surfupdate/surface-pro-4-stuck-in-uefi-loop-cant-change/803bed4e-1dd2-4622-ba54-155d51f8b8f9?auth=1

McKnife

There is a process that you can try that should overcome this problem, at least when the OS partition (as opposed to the boot partition) is still intact:
1 Boot some Recovery media, like a windows setup USB stick
2 use your image backup tool to create a backup image of your c: drive (and if present, other data drives)
3 use diskpart clean to clear the drive
4 reinstall windows - it will boot
5 restore your c: (and eventually data drives) right over the newly installed OS drive.

Matt Hodge

ASKER

Thanks for all input. There isnt a whole lot on this hard drive, so I decided to simply reinstall windows from a Windows 10 Pro DVD, but it doesnt seem to detect the hard drive. Is it likely that the SSD drive is shot, or do I need to install drivers for the SSD drive?

McKnife

No drivers needed for the hard drive controller on a surface.
Please open the UEFI firmware/"Bios" and see whether a drive is detected in there.

Matt Hodge

ASKER

Hmm - I don't specifically see someplace in the UEFI that shows me whether an SSD card is there, or not. It lists PCinformation, which doesn't show anything. Security, Devices (which just shows what is enabled on it, like camera/audio/WiFi/Bluetooth) boot configuration (which shows windows boot manager/internal storage/usb storage/PXE network) all of which are checked off) date and time/about/ and exit.

McKnife

Please look at "device info" or similar, see

Matt Hodge

ASKER

Please see attached on what shows on mine.
IMG_7936.jpeg

McKnife

Yes, what's below the Devices section?

Matt Hodge

ASKER

see attached -
IMG_7937.jpeg

McKnife

That's not about hard drives... sorry, I don't have a SF4 to compare with. What's in the boot section?

Matt Hodge

ASKER

see attached
IMG_7938.jpeg

McKnife

Ok... so there is no model name to be found and we cannot be sure if that thing even lives.
I have not seen many SSDs ever die, but "never say never".

I would boot some cloning software and see if it finds a source drive to clone from. Take clonezilla https://osdn.net/projects/clonezilla/downloads/69912/clonezilla-live-2.5.6-22-amd64.iso/

McKnife

10 months without feedback, then you select the first comment as "solution". Could you explain why you didn't follow up on all the effort that I invested here?