Unable to boot Surface Pro - Logo continually flashes

Copper Contributor

I am on a recent insider preview build (not sure which - perhaps 17101) without issues but later in the day yesterday, it failed to boot up my old Surface Pro. It displays the Surface logo for a few seconds, blacks out and then redisplays the logo.

 

I am not sure the issue is related to the preview or something else. I tried the 2-button restart (Vol Up + Power for 15 secs) and have had no success.

 

Any ideas? Perhaps a bootable USB with the current preview? I did attempt to boot a bootable USB with Fall Creators on it but the USB flashed a few times but did not boot.

 

Thanks,

Gary Davis

3 Replies
I was able to boot my Surface Pro back to where I was using a bootable recovery drive. My first USB failed to boot. I could see its light flash several times but then it gave up and returned to the normal failing boot logo flash so I tried a different 8Gb USB which did work.

As explained in the link above, to boot the Surface Pro to a USB, press & hold Vol Down; press power once; after logo displays, release Vol. USB continues to flash as it boots up.

I created the recovery USB from a Surface Pro 3 (my work PC) unchecking the save-system-files. It does not take long. Next, move the USB to the Surface Pro and boot up recovery (it must still be on the hard drive hidden partition). I chose the option to fix the startup but when it completed, it said there was nothing to fix. I next chose to boot Windows and that actually worked. My old Windows preview came up. I took this opportunity to create a full recovery USB.

To make sure everything was back to normal, I rebooted and again got stuck in the logo-loop. So now I put my recovery USB back and booted to it. I chose to start Windows and it got me back. So I figured that if I install the awaiting 17107 preview, it would fix my boot block or whatever is broken in the boot loader. After the install completed, it finally got me back to my old working system. Phew!

Thanks,
Gary
Thanks for ur post. Will u be able to recover ur backup as well? Because, I am facing the similar problem. When I checked with Microsoft, they told me that I will be able to boot my laptop with the USB recovery option but I can’t recover my backup. Please clarify which will help to recover my backup. Thanks in advance