Occasionally, if you’re troubleshooting your Surface Pro tablet or resetting forgotten Windows 8 password, you’ll have to boot it from a USB flash drive. Here’s how you can boot your Microsoft Surface Pro tablet from a USB flash drive.
How to Boot Microsoft Surface Pro from USB Flash Drive?
- Shut down your Microsoft Surface Pro tablet.
- Plug in your USB flash drive.
- Press and hold the Volume down key on the left side of the Surface Pro and press the Power button once.
- If you do the combination correctly, the system will attempt to boot from the operating system which is installed on your USB flash drive.
Please note that Microsoft Surface Pro tablet runs with only UEFI native mode. It doesn’t support Legacy BIOS mode. So you can only install a 64-bit UEFI capable operating system on your USB flash drive. Additionally, UEFI can’t recognize NTFS device and you need to format your USB flash drive as FAT32, along with a GPT (GUID Partition Table) partition scheme instead of MBR partition scheme. You can make such a boot USB drive using ISO2Disc.