![]() So the short end is, it seems the Surface Pro's firmware is strict about what it will boot from USB, and it seems to be a device that must be a single FAT32 partition with the "boot" and "lba" flags set, or else it won't work. I used a virtual machine with an EFI install of Windows 8 to stage this at first. I'll just wrap up my last bit of contribution to this for now. It seems like Surface will never boot the SD card if it isn't exactly a single FAT32 partition consuming the entire microSD card. I'll have to actually try installing to the card and seeing if the Surface will boot from it or not. So I formatted and recreated the card with UNetbootin again, verified it was unbootable, then used gparted to set the "lba" flag. what I noticed was that Rufus was setting the "lba" flag on the SD card's FAT32 partition. So then I went back and tried to figure out what was different. You can go through "Advanced Startup" or hold volume down when powering on the Surface. Then I tried it using the Rufus tool linked above - this worked. The Surface would NOT boot off the microSD card through "Advanced Startup." Then I used UNetbootin again, this time on an 8GB microSD I had laying around. Nothing special, was able to launch the live session. Works as expected, can go into the "Advanced Startup" screen and boot from USB device. ![]() So first I made a bootable generic USB flash drive using UNetbootin and a stock Ubuntu 14.04 desktop installation image. I also wanted to leave the recovery partition intact as a good just-in-case.) (Especially since I have the 64GB base model and that's really barely enough for a comfortable use of Windows. I haven't done an actual installation yet, but I was just playing with the idea of making a bootable USB device preferably without having to change the internal SSD. I just got a Surface Pro 2 and started playing with the idea of booting Linux off the SD card.
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