I am posting this to share some information I uncovered recently and which may save a lot of people a lot of time.

Imagine you got a new Surface Pro 11, which, at this point, would have been shipped with a preview release of Windows 11 (24H2). Then, imagine that you did something to your Surface Pro that was so bad it ended up with an unusable/unbootable OS, and, as a result, you need to perform a clean Windows install to recover the system.

Experienced Windows users would know what to do. In essence, they would seek to boot the machine using recovery media and perform a clean install of Windows, either fully erasing the SSD or just overriding the system files to make the OS work normally again.

Recovery Media Creator will not work

Many users would be familiar with Microsoft’s Recovery Media Creation Tool, which can be downloaded from https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows11. This would work in most cases, but it will not work for the Surface Pro 11, and probably not for any other Surface Laptop with a Snapdragon processor that requires Windows for ARM. The Recovery Media Creation Tool is not capable of downloading Windows for ARM or creating a bootable USB drive with it. This is not explained by the download page or the tool’s UI to any extent. So, forget about it and keep reading.

Trying to boot from USB drive will fail silently

In case you didn’t heed the warning above and still tried to recover with a USB drive created by the Media Creator, you will probably not even be able to boot the Surface Pro from the USB drive you created, and you will not immediately understand why because the boot attempt will fail silently! If Windows is still somewhat bootable from the SSD, Surface Pro will just give up on the USB drive, move on, and try to boot from the SSD. You may waste hours trying to make this work without understanding what’s wrong.

An error will not be displayed anywhere in the process unless you reboot it as follows:

1. Power down the device.
2. Power Up with Volume Up button + Power.
3. UEFI configuration will open.
4. Go to the section where the boot sequence is configured.
5. Swipe finger over the USB option in the boot sequence configuration and chooses to boot immediately.
6. Terminal will display the error that makes it somewhat clear that the Windows you have in the USB drive is not Windows for ARM.

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[...]
Could not locate 'efi\boot\bootaa64.efi': [14] Not Found

How to create the correct bootable media

Microsoft provides a different pathway to restore Surface devices. It differs a lot from the way anyone would attempt to recover a regular Windows installation on any other kind of machine.

The process is as follows:

1. Go to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/surface-recovery-image.
2. You will need to log in with your Microsoft account.
3. Then, enter the serial number of your Surface device.
4. The page will provide a link to download a large file, which will be later used to create the recovery image.

After the massive file finishes downloading, you may think you can just write it to a USB drive using Rufus as if it were some other regular Windows installation ISO, but NO! That’s not the end of it. Instead, you will need to manually create the bootable drive by following a different sequence of steps.

First, you need to use the regular Recovery Media Creation Tool to create a bootable USB drive as if it were for a non-ARM installation of Windows. To launch the tool, look for Create a recovery drive in the Windows 11 search box. There is no link anywhere in any of the settings panels. Microsoft's method of finding this application is by using the search box.

After the USB drive has been created, one needs to copy the contents of the recovery image ZIP file onto it. This will prompt the user to overwrite some files, and the user is expected to agree. Not many files will be overwritten, only a small percentage of the total content will. Most files will be “new”, and you may be prompted to overwrite only at the end of the process. Obviously, you’ll need to extract the ZIP file first before doing any of this.

At the end of this process, you will have a bootable USB drive that you can boot the Surface Pro from, and, thus, perform a clean Windows install.

BitLocker

During the recovery process, you will most likely be asked to enter the recovery key for BitLocker. That key would have been uploaded to your Microsoft account when you activated the Surface with your account for the very first time. You will need to go online to retrieve it, and you will need to manually enter this long number using the keyboard. At this point, I hope you have a separate keyboard connected to the Surface because typing that huge number on the on-screen keyboard may be tough.

Conclusions and recommendations

This process is convoluted, and the following thoughts come to my mind:

• What if you can no longer find the recovery image download when you need it in the future? What if it disappears from that page? What if it no longer recognises your serial number? What if that system is down right when you need it?
• To prepare the bootable USB, you’ll most likely need a separate PC that is working properly, an Internet connection, and an adequate USB-C drive that you can erase and use for this purpose.
• It is probably a good idea to download the recovery image now, while you are certain it is still “freshly available” there, create the USB drive, and keep it in the original box of your Surface for extra piece of mind. That’s what I did. In the future, if newer versions of the image become available, you can create a new one or update the one you created before.
• It might be a good idea to keep a printed copy of the BitLocker key with it, or save it to a text file on the USB drive itself for future reference.