Install Windows 10 Technical Preview on Surface Pro

I tried to install Windows 10 Tech Preview on my Surface Pro 1 and had just a little difficulty.  Looking online I found some instructions in different places but not everything I had to do all in one place.  So here is my take on the process with all the instructions I needed.

Note: Do NOT use the Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool.  This tool formats the USB drive using NTFS.  The Surface is looking for a UEFI device which needs to be formatted as Fat32.

1. Obligatory notes: Backup everything you need from your Surface before you start.
2. Download the Windows 10 Technical Preview.
3. Use a USB flash drive that is of sufficient size.  I needed just over 4GB.  So an 8GB drive would work.
4. To create the install USB, open a command prompt and follow these directions.
• Open an elevated command prompt, then start the Diskpart utility, List the disks, Select the USB stick, and Clean it:
• Diskpart.exe
• List disk
• Select disk 4
• Clean
• Create a new partition, make it active, format as FAT32, and assign a drive letter:
• Create part primary
• Select part 1
• Active
• Format quick fs=fat32
• Assign
• Exit, but leave the command prompt open.
5. Mount the Windows 10 ISO to a drive and then use the xcopy command in the already open command prompt to copy the files over.  In the below example the g: drive is where the ISO is mounted and the f: is where the USB is mounted.
• xcopy g:\* f:\ /s /e
6. Once that is done, now you have a USB ready to boot on the Surface but you may still need to copy over the Surface drivers just to be sure you have them.  Go to the following link, download the "Surface Pro 1" zip file.  Extract it and copy to your USB drive.  Now we need to prepare the Surface.
• http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38826
7. There are 2 primary ways to disable Secure Boot.  Here is the easiest way.  First, make sure to shutdown the Surface.  Hold the Volume Up button down and press the Power once once.  When you see the Surface logo you can let go of the Volume Up button.  When you see the black screen with boot options, select Secure Boot and hit the space bar to change to disabled.  Save and reboot and you will see a red background screen indicating that Secure Boot is disabled.
8. Plug in your USB and reboot the Surface.  It should boot directly into the Windows install.  *If you get a message about a missing media driver, reboot and try again.  This happened to me on 2 out of 2 I tried this on.  A simple reboot and it was able to keep going.

ConfigMgr Reports & Dell Server Administrator

ConfigMgr, in this case 2012 R2, Reports is showing older version of Dell "Server Administrator" but a newer version of OpenManage Server Administrator has been installed.

1. Latest version of OMSA was installed a couple weeks ago.

2. ConfigMgr Client Hardware Inventory was run in the last 24 hours.

So the ConfigMgr database should have the latest data.  But the Report is still showing that an old version of "Server Administrator" is still present.

We looked at the Resource Manager for a client showing this issues and found that there were two instances of "Server Administrator".  One of them was for the actual OMSA and the other was for omremote.exe, which is a file that DSET installs.

So, the old version of "Server Administrator" was actually the OMRemote.exe file installed with DSET.  DSET uses OMRemote.exe to do remote server report collection.  You can opt out of installing OMRemote during DSET install if you want and DSET will still run fine on the local system.

Customer wasn't using DSET, so solution was to uninstall it, force a new ConfigMgr Hardware Inventory, and run the report again.