Solved Help! SP3 Reset Your PC "Unable to reset PC. A required drive partition is missing."

[Devvic]

Hi everyone, I have a Surface Pro 3 and i made a huge mistake today. I was messing around with EasyBCD and NeoGrub trying to get android to dualboot on my surface, besides the point. I went to delete my bad boot entries and accidentally deleted all of my BCD files.
I figured i could reinstall windows 10 and that didn't work because the drive was locked?.
I wiped the drive in CMD prompt and i cant figure out what to do to get my surface to allow me to re install windows.

Where i am:
I have a recovery USB but when i try to Reset my pc i get an error "Unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing."
I cant refresh because "the drive where Windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again." plus im pretty sure i have reformatted my drive already.
I am good with computers but not great and i dont want to do anymore damage.

Can anyone walk me through the steps needed to remake the partition to get windows to allow me to use the "Reset your PC" option. I do not care about lost data.

 

[GreyFox7]

Assuming you had 10 installed, look for Windows 10 clean install guide. One of the Options is to wipe the drive which removes all partitions. This can be done in the Setup or via diskpart clean. Several sites had articles on this.

 

[Devvic]

Ok so i have an external cd drive, i will go pick up my Windows 8 disk from home and try to install that and then re-upgrade to windows 10. I was under the assumption that the USB i made from the microsoft website was the same thing. Ill get back to this forum if it works... wish me luck

 

[GreyFox7]

If you made the W10 USB with the Media Creation Tool is should work fine with one caveat, apparently it needs to be 64bit only if you choose 32bit or both when you created it from what I hear it wont work right on a Surface.

 

[Devvic]

I went here: Download a recovery image for Microsoft Surface
to get a recovery image. Is this what you are saying should work?
If so when i load it up everything works fine until i go to "Reset your PC" then it attempts to reset it but tells me a partition is missing and the only option i have is to go back to the main menu.
Im downloading it now .

 

[GreyFox7]

I went here: Download a recovery image for Microsoft Surface
to get a recovery image. Is this what you are saying should work?
If so when i load it up everything works fine until i go to "Reset your PC" then it attempts to reset it but tells me a partition is missing and the only option i have is to go back to the main menu.
Im downloading it now .

That's a recovery image and AFAIK you can only get the one you Surface came with... 8.1 the way it sounds. different scenario.

Here's a link to theW10 Media Creation Tool
Windows 10

Instructions Installing Windows 10 using the media creation tool - Windows Help
See "Clean install" procedure at the bottom, after you create the USB

 

[Devvic]

It worked!! Thank you so much, i was up till 11:30 working on this last night and was going to try to bring it to Microsoft today. You saved my day!

 

[leeshor]

Glad you got it working. Marked solved.

 

[checktravis]

I was in the same situation, had the recovery USB but not the full image. Just wanted to add - instead of downloading the image (didn't have another windows device) I plugged in a Ethernet USB adapter hub with the recovery USB on it, and chose to recover from the cloud. Then, it said it would reparation and seems to be going ok now.

You could also use wifi but I figured it would be too slow for my patience

 

[AKH]

Thanks a lot GreyFox7, your advice helped me with the same problem as Devvic.