Doing a clean install of Windows 10 on a Surface 3

[enixon]

To clarify: I didn't have any trouble booting to the USB drive and performing the install. I used the Media Creation tool to build the USB and it worked perfectly. It's the post-install OS that I'm having trouble with. No audio, no WiFi, and after being active for a few minutes, it locks up and stops accepting input from the keyboard, touchpad, and even touchscreen.

Google "Surface 3 Drivers", the first link should be a Microsoft page. Find the MSI file for your device, and make sure it is Win10. That should fix all your problems.

 

[Shelgeyr]

Final update on my Surface saga, with a potentially pertinent detail that I unintentionally left out of my earlier posts:

The clean install I was attempting was for Windows 10 Professional, because I created the USB stick on my desktop PC.
This may or may not be "the reason" that the device behaved so poorly upon completion of the install.

In any case - I did a factory restore with the recovery image I downloaded from Microsoft, then downloaded the "Media Creation Tool" to the Surface and selected the "upgrade this pc now" option.

Win10 Home is now running smoothly, and I'm happy with it. No real need for Win10 Pro as the only 'professional' feature I care about is allowing incoming RDP sessions and I'm not at all likely to want to RDP *to* the Surface.

 

[enixon]

Final update on my Surface saga, with a potentially pertinent detail that I unintentionally left out of my earlier posts:

The clean install I was attempting was for Windows 10 Professional, because I created the USB stick on my desktop PC.
This may or may not be "the reason" that the device behaved so poorly upon completion of the install.

In any case - I did a factory restore with the recovery image I downloaded from Microsoft, then downloaded the "Media Creation Tool" to the Surface and selected the "upgrade this pc now" option.

Win10 Home is now running smoothly, and I'm happy with it. No real need for Win10 Pro as the only 'professional' feature I care about is allowing incoming RDP sessions and I'm not at all likely to want to RDP *to* the Surface.

Windows Home has always allowed RDP... Just search for Remote Desktop through Cortana and you will get the settings to enable it. Windows Pro only adds Domain to the mix, which is not what you're looking to do. Domain is for connecting remotely to a secured server, like businesses or universities.

 

[cygnus11]

Windows 10 Home does not include remote desktop according to this: https://forums.windowscentral.com/e...Fwindows%2Fwindows-10-editions&token=k6HjghhJ

Am I reading that wrong?

 

[Dewg]

I'm waiting for the Windows 10 Recovery Image to be released - which is supposed to be "very soon", hopefully in the next week or two. Once that's out you can download it to a USB drive, then boot to it on your Surface and reset your system (with drive re-partitioning) for a "clean install", all drivers pre-installed.

 

[enixon]

Windows 10 Home does not include remote desktop according to this: https://forums.windowscentral.com/e...Fwindows%2Fwindows-10-editions&token=HWWZtnTe

Am I reading that wrong?

You're not reading that wrong, but I can safely say that Windows Home supports RDP. It might not support a different standard, which maybe Windows 10 Pro does. However, I can connect to other RDP clients through my Surface 3 with Windows 10.

Edit: So AFTER writing this and looking at my settings, it looks like Home cannot be used as a remote desktop host. So I cannot use my Surface 3 to RDP into, but I can RDP from it. Kind of dumb, but there are a million ways around it if 3rd party clients are OK with you.

 

[seremify]

Hi all, I successfully upgraded to Windows 10 Pro on my Surface 3 (so it's fully activated) but ran into a few issues along the way (eg missing start menu) but now am finding there seem to be all sorts of random bugs/crashes/errors when using my network, and it lags a lot... so why not do a clean install.

I've used the media creation kit to create a USB with Windows 10 on it, and I ran into a few question marks. e.g. when using the reset my PC, it said it was unable to do this as I was missing the recovery partition (but it's there!).

Then, when I used the advanced boot options to boot from the USB, I realised that I have 5 partitions including the Recovery one there! Am I able to just format/delete all of these as the Surface 3 image is available online to download again anyway?

Anything else I need to be aware of? e.g. missing drivers?

 

[seremify]

Oh no ended up with black blank screen after a while. Waited. Tried various tricks from google like windows key + p, but to no avail. No cursor visible. Restarted by holding power button and then turning on again, and setup seemed to continue as fine. Created new user account details and ticked a few boxes then it said it wouldn't take long to finish setting up. And again stuck at blank screen for a while. Nothing happening as far as I can tell.

Powered off again using the power button held down . Will see how it goes tomorrow as its 1:20am and I have work in the morning!

 

[seremify]

Found the drivers on the Microsoft website. Downloading now (not sure which ones so just picked anything with Surface 3 and Win10 in the name) > Download Surface software, firmware, and drivers from Official Microsoft Download Center

Hope it works tonight!

 

[seremify]

I'm waiting for the Windows 10 Recovery Image to be released - which is supposed to be "very soon", hopefully in the next week or two. Once that's out you can download it to a USB drive, then boot to it on your Surface and reset your system (with drive re-partitioning) for a "clean install", all drivers pre-installed.

I'm holding out for this too now... my Surface 3 refuses to activate. For some reason it doesn't recognise my Windows 10. I previously had Win 10 Pro before I formatted it and thought MS saved your device details + product key somewhere... sigh, shame on me for not backing it up separately. Really should've used that Produkey or something.

 

[Dewg]

Hi all, I successfully upgraded to Windows 10 Pro on my Surface 3

The S3 comes with Home edition. How did you get Pro out of it? Did you upgrade 8.1 Home to Pro before the upgrade to 10?

 

[Dos101]

I'm holding out for this too now... my Surface 3 refuses to activate. For some reason it doesn't recognise my Windows 10. I previously had Win 10 Pro before I formatted it and thought MS saved your device details + product key somewhere... sigh, shame on me for not backing it up separately. Really should've used that Produkey or something.

I have the same issue with my S3 when trying to do a clean install (except mine was always W10 Home). I'm not sure how people are able to do a clean install on their S3's, mine just won't activate no matter what I do.

 

[Dewg]

I have the same issue with my S3 when trying to do a clean install (except mine was always W10 Home). I'm not sure how people are able to do a clean install on their S3's, mine just won't activate no matter what I do.

Mine was fine. I upgraded to Windows 10 using the normal methods (let it upgrade using the "Get 10" app, or Windows Update). Once it was done upgrading, I checked to make sure it was Activated. Once that was done, I wiped the S3 and laid down a clean install of Windows 10 (blew out all partitions). During the install it asked for a product key, I just clicked "Skip this" to move on. Once everything was installed and the drivers were put in, Windows activated itself automatically (it took about 30 mins, but it activated). No need for a product key at all.

I ended up having a problem with the drivers, so I restored back to Windows 8.1 using the Recovery Image and repartitioning the drive. That activated as well. Then, after a few cumulative updates were out for Windows 10, I let it upgrade itself again. Same - still activated. I then did a "Reset" through Settings to do a "fresh" install of Windows 10. Again, still activated.

 

[Dos101]

Mine was fine. I upgraded to Windows 10 using the normal methods (let it upgrade using the "Get 10" app, or Windows Update). Once it was done upgrading, I checked to make sure it was Activated. Once that was done, I wiped the S3 and laid down a clean install of Windows 10 (blew out all partitions). During the install it asked for a product key, I just clicked "Skip this" to move on. Once everything was installed and the drivers were put in, Windows activated itself automatically (it took about 30 mins, but it activated). No need for a product key at all.

I ended up having a problem with the drivers, so I restored back to Windows 8.1 using the Recovery Image and repartitioning the drive. That activated as well. Then, after a few cumulative updates were out for Windows 10, I let it upgrade itself again. Same - still activated. I then did a "Reset" through Settings to do a "fresh" install of Windows 10. Again, still activated.

That's the process I used. Waited for 2 days and still wouldn't activate. I just don't understand what, if anything, I'm doing wrong. My desktop and laptop had no issues activating after a clean install, just my Surface 3 does.

 

[seremify]

The S3 comes with Home edition. How did you get Pro out of it? Did you upgrade 8.1 Home to Pro before the upgrade to 10?

I had a few retail copies of Pro from back when they were cheap and used one of these to upgrade. I even had the Media Centre pack (free at one point) on my S3 before but lost it (not that it matters).

 

[seremify]

That's the process I used. Waited for 2 days and still wouldn't activate. I just don't understand what, if anything, I'm doing wrong. My desktop and laptop had no issues activating after a clean install, just my Surface 3 does.

I ended up going back to a clean Win 8.1 using the recovery image and running the upgrade from within Windows 8.

 

[Waughy]

Did mine a few days ago, after joining the preview program and finding that the TH2 update made my S3 run like crap. I had thought about doing a clean install, this just gave me an excuse to go ahead and do it.
I didn't have a spare USB drive so made an install disc (blu ray disc actually, only used about 6Gb but I wasn't going to use the disc for anything else, and had no dual layer DVDs to use) with the media creation tool using an external blu ray player. Used a USB hub to plug in a 2Gb USB drive that had the drivers on it, and USB keyboard to TAB my way through things during setup, like skipping the product key. Booted from the disc and went through the install, deleting ALL partitions (it makes new ones for recovery and EFI when creating the new C: drive to install to).
Had a bit of a heart stopping moment when it failed around 70% when copying from the disc, but just started again and had no further troubles. It did seem to hang at a "just a moment" screen before getting to windows after the install, so I did a reboot and it was fine again, it set up an offline account and loaded into windows. I don't know about drivers but I'm thinking it may have loaded generic drivers from the install disc as it never asked me for any drivers, it just downloaded what it needed when I ran update. Linked my Microsoft account, got Office and redownloaded my apps and set things back up how I wanted. So far it seems to be going well, haven't come across any issues in the last few days. No issues with activation either. My S3 had gone through all the 8.1 updates and the 10 update prior to starting the clean install.
Overall I had a fairly good experience, not much different to my last pc install with Windows 7 many years ago. Hopefully I won't have to do it again, but if it happens I've got no reservations about having another go at it. From the look of things, if I want to start over again I should be able to just do a reset rather than go through the above all over again.

 

[Boris Tarana]

I had same problem to install clean window 10 pro, because there is no driver for no pro version of surface 3 still on microsoft site (don't work touch panel and many others problem). But i find solution how to install windows 10 pro without any problem to work like charm.

1. I use recover image disk for Surface 3 from microsoft site.
2. It's very important to dont activate your windows 8.1, because its will be home edtiion if you activated. just left not activated.
3. Make usb boot instalation of windows 10 pro.
4. update windows 8.1 directly from windows not boot from usb.
5. Enter your serial key for windows 10 pro and enjoy in full work of windows 10 pro on your surface.

 

[ealkalai]

Is it possible to use a recovery image from an SD card?
Unfortunately i don't have a large enough usb drive available

 

[bockersjv]

Don't think so. Just buy a new usb flash drive, 8Gb ones can be had for less than ?10lly make that ?5.

Or use a Micros usb card reader, which will probably cost the same. This will mean losing all the info on the sd card too.