My Surface Pro 8 suddenly rebooted while I was working in Windows. Since then, the device will not start normally.
The built-in diagnosis/startup repair runs but fails every time. I created a Microsoft recovery USB using the official instructions and completed the recovery process, but the Surface still returns to the screen saying that the repair could not be completed successfully.
I also tried reinstalling Windows. However, Windows Setup asks me to provide a driver before it can continue. I downloaded the Surface Pro driver package, but it is an MSI installer and cannot be used directly from the Windows Setup driver-selection screen. I tried to extract the contents from the MSI archive, which gives me 2 .cab files. Unpacking these files also does not really give me the .inf files I need to provide driver files. (I used msiexec /a to unpack these files which did not work for me).
From the recovery environment, I can access the C: drive and read files. However, Windows Setup does not detect the internal drive as an available installation target, and the recovery process also fails.
I reached out to Microsoft and they are asking almost $1,000 for an exchange and won’t even guarantee that I’ll get the same device type, just something “comparable”. With their latest downgrade, that a device only needs 4GB of RAM I am afraid they might push some crap on me with 8GB instead of 16 which I have now.
Before I go this step and risk my device not being a Surface Pro 8, I would appreciate suggestions for additional troubleshooting steps, especially options to keep the device.
