Resetting Surface RT

[JellymanEN]

Hello everybody, I don't know if this is a stupid question or not, but I have just sold my Surface RT and want to factory reset it, will this take my Surface RT back to win 8.0 or is the restore partition changed to Windows 8.1 ?
If it will be taken back to Windows RT 8.0 is there a way for me to prevent it ?

Sent from my Surface with Windows 8 Pro using Tapatalk

 

[Rick_Air]

I'm fairly confident it just wipes all your personal data and settings while leaving the os version alone.

 

[RajeevT]

As far as I am aware if you didn’t create a recovery USB drive prior to upgrading to RT 8.1, you cannot simply reset back to RT 8.0. The Surface's on-device recovery partition gets updated to RT 8.1 along with the main partition and only the USB drive lets you go back. If you want to do a complete reset/downgrade to RT 8.0 then even a recovery USB created on someone else's device (same model with RT 8.0 installed) will work, or else you'll need to track down the factory RT 8.0 image that MS had once made available for download on its site.

tl;dr: If you're selling you can reset (not just refresh) the device and it should end up with a clean copy of RT 8.1 installed, although you (or the new owner) will most likely need to re-download and reinstall all the post 8.1 updates.