Unable to roll SP3 back to Win 8.1

[Y2HBK]

Ive been using the Win10 TP on my SP3 for awhile now. I will be using the device for business starting next week and need to roll it back to 8.1.

I went through all the steps of downloading the recovery image from Microsoft's website and copying it to a fat32 formatted hard drive. When I got to boot the drive off the SP3 I get a "Secure Boot Violation. Invalid Signature Detected. Check Secure Boot Policy in Setup." Seemed simple enough. I get to "bios" and disable secure boot. When I go that, save the changes and then reboot my SP3 immediately blue screens. I can't get back into windows and can't figure out how to boot off the USB from here. Sometimes it will go into Bitlocker recovery, then tell me there is a problem and crash.

If I turn secure boot back on I can get back into Win10 without issue. Any ideas? No I do not have a backup on the SP3 already - I installed Win10 TP clean from USB.

 

[Y2HBK]

Unless Im missing something that article is for users that upgraded to Win 10 from 8.1. I stated I did a fresh install off a USB. My recovery partition on my SP3 is a Win 10 recovery partition.

Nevermind, I get it now. Ill try it. Thanks.

 

[ven07]

Unless Im missing something that article is for users that upgraded to Win 10 from 8.1. I stated I did a fresh install off a USB. My recovery partition on my SP3 is a Win 10 recovery partition.

Oh my mistake!! Wrong place lol

 

[Y2HBK]

Tried rolling back to the previous build and it failed. Recommended I refresh instead, which I did. Same problem. Tried to roll back from the refresh and it failed again. Looks like I'm stuck in a bitlicker recovery loop now. Goes to boot into bitlocker recovery then says "There was a problem. Restart your PC to try again. Error code 8007139f"

I can't find anything concrete about this error online and I can't get it to do anything else. I use the Windows 7/8 USB download tool to burn a generic Win 8.1 installer in case there was something wrong with the image for the SP3 from microsoft.

When I try to boot off the USB with secure boot on or off by holding down the volume down volume rocker and powering on the surface logo comes up and disappears immediately - then reboots and goes right to bitlocker recovery. This is extremely frustrating. How is it possible any generic PC can be easily reimaged that Ived used over the past 5-10 years in an enterprise environment but this one is such a convoluted PitA?

Does ANYONE have any ideas?

 

[BaritoneGuy]

Tried rolling back to the previous build and it failed. Recommended I refresh instead, which I did. Same problem. Tried to roll back from the refresh and it failed again. Looks like I'm stuck in a bitlicker recovery loop now. Goes to boot into bitlocker recovery then says "There was a problem. Restart your PC to try again. Error code 8007139f"

I can't find anything concrete about this error online and I can't get it to do anything else. I use the Windows 7/8 USB download tool to burn a generic Win 8.1 installer in case there was something wrong with the image for the SP3 from microsoft.

When I try to boot off the USB with secure boot on or off by holding down the volume down volume rocker and powering on the surface logo comes up and disappears immediately - then reboots and goes right to bitlocker recovery. This is extremely frustrating. How is it possible any generic PC can be easily reimaged that Ived used over the past 5-10 years in an enterprise environment but this one is such a convoluted PitA?

Does ANYONE have any ideas?

Download a recovery image for Microsoft Surface