Put it in a safe place and retain that ZIP file just in case too. Then, copy the contents of the folder you just uncompressed onto the recovery drive. Then, format the USB flash drive as FAT32 (more on that in a moment), erase it and rename it to something obvious like RECOVERY. Once you’ve downloaded the file, unzip it to your desktop. (I needed a magnifying glass and a light.) The download is a 6.4 GB ZIP file. To get the image, you will need your Surface Pro 3 serial number, which is written in tiny gray text on the slightly lighter gray Surface Pro 3 kickstand. This image will be used to create a special recovery drive-it requires a 16 GB USB flash drive-that includes everything that is normally on a USB recovery drive plus the recovery files that are normally accessed from the Surface Pro 3 disk. Microsoft makes a Surface Pro 3 recovery image available for download: this is critical for restoring your device back to its factory fresh state if everything goes wrong and the on-device or USB-based recovery tools are unavailable for some reason. Download the Surface Pro 3 recovery image and create an uber recovery drive Make sure you have an 8 GB or bigger USB flash drive, and leave the option “Copy the recovery partition from the PC to the recovery drive” selected. Here’s how: Use Start Search, look for recovery and choose “Create a recovery drive” from the results. If you own a Surface Pro 3, you should do this now and keep it in an easily accessible location. Here’s the 8 GB version ($5.50) and here is the 16 GB version ($7.50). I recently purchased a few Kingston Data Traveler 3.0 USB flash drives because you can write on them with a sharpie, and they’re not at all expensive. You will need at least one 8 GB flash drive (preferably two) and one 16 GB flash drive to create the recovery disks described below. So before getting to dual-booting, I wanted to quickly document the ways in which you can prepare to recover your Surface Pro 3 no matter what happens. But while investigating this topic I ran into a number of issues that are somewhat unique to Microsoft’s tablet. I’ll be publishing a guide to dual-booting Surface Pro 3 with Windows 10 soon.
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