Symptoms
You experience the following symptoms on some Surface devices that have the 1TB drive configuration:
-
Diskpart shows two 512 GB drives instead of a single 1 TB drive.
-
Windows Explorer shows two 512 GB drives instead of single 1 TB drive.
-
A bare metal recovery (BMR) image states "There was a problem recovering your PC" or reports other errors when you try to restore the BMR image.
Surface devices that are impacted by this issue:
-
Surface Pro (5th gen) 1TB drive configuration
-
Surface Laptop (1st Gen) 1TB drive configuration
-
Surface Pro 6 1TB drive configuration
-
Surface Laptop 2 1TB drive configuration
The following Surface Devices with 1TB drive configuration use a single SSD and are not impacted by this issue
-
Surface Pro 4
-
Surface Book
-
Surface Book 2
-
Surface Studio 2
-
Surface Pro 7
-
Surface Laptop 3
Cause
This issue occurs because some Surface Devices with 1TB drive configuration use Storage Spaces technology to combine two 512-GB drives into a single drive. If you use older deployment or disk configuration tools that do not support the storage spaces it can break a single storage-space drive into two separate drives.
Resolution
To resolve this issue, follow these steps:
-
Download version 3.2.43 or a later version of the Surface Data Eraser tool.
-
Create a Surface Data Eraser drive, and then start the device from that drive.
The Surface Data Eraser tool rejoins the two drives into a single storage-spaces drive. The BMR image can be downloaded and installed, or a custom image can be deployed.
Note The image and deployment tools that are used must be based on the Windows 10, version 1703 (Spring Creators) update or a later Windows 10 update.
