fastamdman

@2FA So much for the idea of trying to install them in Linux then Welllll besides trying to play with Hiren's boot cd later on tonight, I am pretty much throwing in the towel and just gonna swap it out for a new one at microsoft. Thanks again for all the help and advice

Thanks for the advice. I do agree with you, I am leaning to a firmware issue myself. Only reason I am leaning away from a hardware issue is because everything works really well in linux. If I can pass stress testing in linux, I should at least be able to load a windows installer, unless there was a firmware issue. Do you know if it's possible to install firmware in linux?? If so, this might be the only solution. I just don't know how to install .msi files (and where they would go) to be able to then hope to be able to install windows. I am just so intrigued by this issue that I keep tinkering with it. I know I can return it to the store at any point and get a new one, but I will never figure out the why or the what, that was the issue. I rarely run into problems that I can't solve on my own, so needless to say I am intrigued lol. Thanks again for the advice

@BeefyMeats I have tried with secure boot enabled and disabled. We can't change modes between uefi / efi / legacy etc, so it's just always UEFI enabled. No way to change that part. I have used the media creation tool, rufus and imgburn to make the bootable usb drives. I downloaded the ISO straight from microsoft with the media creation tool. The usb drive will work on my desktop, my wifes desktop and any other computer but it will NOT work on the Surface. I have formatted the drive in linux mint with gparted and kde partition etc. I've formatted it and left it blank, put it in fat32 and put it in ntfs file formats. No matter what I do, the bootable usb windows drive will not work. Like I said, they work great on my desktop, but not on the surface. The issue is, the second it starts to open up the "loader" where you would click "next". As it STARTS to load that, it will BSOD. OR, before it even gets to that point, it will give a BSOD, aka right after the spinning circle of dots finishes.

I will give hiren's boot cd a shot later on tonight, maybe I can get an older version of windows on there, like 8.1. Even though 8.1 has no driver/firmware support, MAYBE just maybe if I get it installed, I will then be able to install windows 10. I highly doubt microsoft will be able to "repair" this, at least not in store. If they do, I will be amazed. I will have to record them working on it Thanks for all of your help guys. I will let you know how Hiren's boot cd does and if I can get anything else to install besides linux. Wish me luck I will say though, for the day or two of use that I got out of the surface before this issue arrived, it's a bad ass machine. The price point is a little high, but I got it much cheaper than retail, which made it a great deal.

That's the older surface pro 3, not the newest surface 2017. But the information is still valid either way. I read through that a couple of days ago. I have a very high technical understanding of software and hardware (which is why I am not giving up on this and just waiting until my Saturday apt at the Microsoft Store). I am more intrigued by this issue than anything else. It just baffles me that a nix os will boot and install perfectly fine, but windows won't.

Looks like they are using WinPE to be able to update the firmware. Unfortunately, I can't get WinPE or any Windows for that matter, to boot from the flash drive on the surface. Maybe we are looking at this wrong. Maybe instead of trying to figure out how to get it to boot from windows, we should be trying to get windows to boot from within linux.....I dunno, just an idea.

Whether it is or not, that package is a .msi which would need to be installed inside of windows unfortunately. I would need a .rom of the bios to be able to even attempt to flash it through usb.

We sent that at the exact same time lol. I can't find any other bios's however for the surface. It looks like all the firmware and bios updates are pushed out through windows updates unfortunately. At this point, I am out of ideas.

Ugh, the bios I found and linked above is for an older model. They are talking about windows vista and it was published 11/16/2009 which is way way before mine was ever made lol. The surface 2017, also known as the surface pro 5, didn't come out until last year lol. If anyone can find a bios update for it, I will give it a shot. Otherwise, it's looking like the microsoft store is gonna be my best route unfortunately. I am gonna keep plugging away at the problem though until Saturday when I can get to the store lol.

Ya, best I could find was this link https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/deploy-the-latest-firmware-and-drivers-for-surface-devices Problem is that is just firmware / drivers and they are all .msi files that need to be installed inside of windows lol. Actually, I found this link that has a .rom file that "might" be for my surface. It came with a PDF so I will read through it. Heres the link in case anyone else needs it in the future. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7190

That is true, but I have seen countless numbers of errors on the bsod. It almost seems random. Also, if there was a ram issue, you would think that I would have issues in Linux. Linux mint works 100% perfectly fine. I can stress test it, I can browse the web, I can do anything I want in linux mint, I just can't install windows without it bsod'ing lol. I'm thinking if it was ram or cpu or the nvme drive, I would have issues in linux as well.

That is my best guess as well. However I don't think there are any surface bios's that are floating around that 1 aren't installed via windows updates and 2 are able to be installed via linux or from a flash drive. I haven't been able to find a surface model 1796 bios file anywhere thus far, but even if I did, I am assuming it would need a windows "bios update program" to go along with it lol.

As I said above, I tried WinPE as well, but it does the exact same thing. WinPE, Windows, anything windows related will BSOD before any installer or cmd prompt comes up. The only thing that doesn't bsod is linux, which is the extremely odd part here.

You aren't following me. I can't get to the installer bit. It will BSOD before the installer opens up. Here is the process. Surface is off, I put the flash drive in, I press the power button. Surface logo comes on, surface logo goes away, windows logo comes on. Windows circle dots spinning and then BSOD. There is no way to get to a command prompt, a repair option, a restore option etc. It's a bsod way way before any of those options.

That was my exact thought. I have a feeling that it updated the firmware or bios and then during a reboot it failed to a bsod and could just never recover from it. I was just hoping I could somehow resolve it through linux.