How to reinstall Windows on Surface Laptop?

I've got a bootable USB stick and am getting to the driver loading stage. I've got the Surface Laptop drivers extracted from the Microsoft driver MSI and parked on another USB stick. I'm able to navigate to those drivers and I can select the NVM Express Controller driver. However, when I click "next" to install/use it for installation the installer is failing out with "No new devices drivers were found". Not sure why this is failing? Is there some other driver I need? Windows 10 1803 does not see the hard drive natively so I obviously need some driver...

Brian Knoblauch

Posted 2018-10-19T15:53:54.070

Reputation: 4 313

1Are you using a standard Windows 10 1803 image or are you using an image specifically for the Surface Laptop model you have? If Windows 10 is already installed you can get around some of these troubles by just using Fresh Start instead. – Ramhound – 2018-10-19T16:15:00.223

@Ramhound It's a standard Win 10 1803 image. Windows is not already installed at this time. This machine suffered the HP driver BSOD loop and was unrecoverable even by the recovery fresh start option. I'm paving and starting fresh. :-( – Brian Knoblauch – 2018-10-19T17:52:50.697

What HP driver do you need for a Surface laptop? (The manufacturer is not HP) – HackSlash – 2018-10-19T21:42:23.633

@BrianKnoblauch - Please explain the driver loop, your device, doesn’t have any HP drivers on it. – Ramhound – 2018-10-20T19:17:30.560

Answers

You procedure is correct, but the drivers might be for other Surface version or may be just incomplete. I would like to offer other solutions which build on the drivers already on your disk (but I cannot guarantee success).

Solution 1 : Hard reset

Boot the Surface using a Windows boot media, select "Troubleshoot" and then "Reset your PC".

Solution 2 : Use the recovery image

This solution might be less destructive than the first one.

Download the recovery image from the page Download a recovery image for your Surface.
Create a USB recovery drive with "Create a recovery drive" from the Start menu on another device. Remember to deselect "Backup system files to the recovery drive".
Right-click on the downloaded recovery file and select Extract All, then Extract, which will create a folder in the same directory.
Copy all the files in the extracted folder into your newly created USB recovery drive.
Boot the Surface from this recovery drive, select Troubleshoot, then Recover from a drive, and follow the prompts.

For a detailed description of the process with screenshots see the article
How to reinstall Windows 10 S on your Surface Laptop.

Note: The success of both methods depend on your disk still containing the required recovery partitions of Windows, and on their including viable drivers.

harrymc

Posted 2018-10-19T15:53:54.070

Reputation: 306 093

"Reset your PC" isn't even an option. The recovery image looks very promising though! BIG download, but I have high hopes that this will do it. :-) – Brian Knoblauch – 2018-10-22T17:22:13.063

You can use a USB drive.

To make a surface boot to USB, follow these steps:

1. Insert a Windows 10 bootable USB drive into the USB port on your Surface
2. Press and hold the volume-down button
3. Press and release the power button
4. When the Surface logo appears, release the volume-down button

SOURCE: https://support.microsoft.com/en-nz/help/4023511/surface-boot-surface-from-a-usb-device

HackSlash

Posted 2018-10-19T15:53:54.070

Reputation: 3 174

This is not helpful. I'm already past that stage. I'm failing at the driver loading stage during installation well after this point. – Brian Knoblauch – 2018-10-19T18:54:29.227

I apologize that I didn't read your post well enough. You do not need a special driver for the NVMe drive. We are talking about MS software running on MS hardware. I would assume a hardware problem exists. Either the drive has failed or is not seated correctly in the M.2 slot. – HackSlash – 2018-10-19T21:41:20.940

If I boot up from a Tumbleweed Linux stick that will see the drive. A LEAP Linux stick won't though. So, looks like the interface is not legacy compatible. Still though, I certainly expected a current Windows version to see the storage drive without a special driver! – Brian Knoblauch – 2018-10-22T17:24:15.197

Yeah, that's odd. It certainly doesn't need a special driver. Can you see the drive from the BIOS? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4023532/surface-how-do-i-use-the-bios-uefi

– HackSlash – 2018-10-24T15:29:27.400

Yes, I can see it there. Just not from the Windows installer! – Brian Knoblauch – 2018-10-24T16:00:11.097