PXE Deployment with Surface Pro

16 May 2013 1:44 PM

PXE support has been added to Surface Pro as part of the May firmware update. This means that as long as you have the Surface Pro Ethernet Adapter and installed the firmware update you can now perform PXE based deployments to Surface Pro. For detailed guidance on updating firmware on Surface pro please refer to my previous blog post - http://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/archive/2013/05/14/deploying-drivers-and-firmware-to-surface-pro.aspx.

To perform a deployment from your existing Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 WDS server you need to do the following:

Attach the Surface Pro Ethernet Adapter to the Surface Pro.
Press and hold the volume down button and then press the power button, continue to hold the volume down button until the Surface starts to boot from the USB key.

A dialog box will appear that states that it is “Checking Media Presence……”. Then it will “Start PXE over IPv4”.

3. When prompted press Enter for network boot service.

The Surface Pro should now connect to your PXE server and allow you to perform a normal deployment.

For further details on Surface Pro deployment please refer to the Surface Pro - Enterprise Deployment Quick Start Guide within the Surface Pro firmware and driver pack that I worked with the Surface Team create.