Question Unable to boot UEFI from SATA or USB after connecting Surface Hub SSD ?

[thomasglu]

Hi all,

I was attempting to use the Surface Hub Recovery Tool to reimage the drive of our office's interactive whiteboard. Long story short: the OS began boot looping following the latest bout of updates.

When I connected the drive via a USB dock, the drive showed up in Device Manager as a Startech SCSI device, whereas the Surface Hub Recovery Tool required identifying a drive as either a LITEON L CH-128V2S USB Device or LITEON CV3-CE128 to proceed.

I decided to connect the Surface Hub SSD drive to an available SATA port on my system to let its actual hardware ID be detected, whereupon my PC booted into the Surface Hub's Windows 10 Team operating system instead of my primary drive.
When I restarted the system and attempted to use the boot selection menu to boot back into my Windows 10 operating system, I was taken back to the boot selection menu. When I disconnected the Surface Hub SATA drive and attempted to let my system boot normally, I was told that I selected an improper boot device.

Using the boot selection menu to attempt to boot into a USB recovery, USB Windows installer, or another SSD resulted in being taken back to the boot selection menu.

Oddly, when I connect the Surface Hub's SSD, it will boot into Windows 10 Team, although it experienced the same boot loop issues.

Did my system booting into the Surface Hub's drive somehow irreparably damage my system BIOS to prevent booting to any other drive?

Is there anything I can do to be able to boot from my normal SSD or a USB drive on this system, or did whatever Microsoft do to their Surface Hub SSD configuration brick my system?

 

[Colif]

what are specs of your PC?

it shouldn't have but its possible the boot method swapped and its why it can only see the added drive, not your normal ones.

 

[thomasglu]

what are specs of your PC?

it shouldn't have but its possible the boot method swapped and its why it can only see the added drive, not your normal ones.

I ended up speaking to an ex-Microsoft engineer, who suggested that booting into a Surface Hub SSD could have resulted in Bitlocker changing some non-visible TPM function in the EFI BIOS to lock down to booting from a Bitlocker enabled disk.

Although disabling Secure Boot, TPM, etc. didn't seem to help, I noticed that I was able to boot into any MBR/CSM drive without issue.

I ended up figuring out that if I plugged in an SSD with a bare-metal install of the Surface Hub's Windows 10 Team OS, and ran a normal Windows 10/11 installer from within the OOBE via SHIFT-F10, a combination of the drive having a disabled Bitlocker and its OS being replaced with Windows 11 somehow rectified whatever TPM setting got locked.

It was seriously weird...

 

[Colif]

You could have perhaps been able to reset the BIOS to defaults as that should have removed any changes in the bios too.

Its fixed anyway. bitlocker is something I don't see very often. At one point I thought all win 11 PC would get it but it wasn't the case.