See also: how to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 10.
From the right pane go to and in the center section find your flash drive (you should be able to find it by its size – and the fact Windows recognizes it as Unallocated space.) Right-click on it and select New Simple Volume.
Your Surface comes with Windows recovery info that allows you to refresh it or reset it to its factory condition.
Make sure to transfer any important data on your USB drive to another storage device before using it to create a recovery drive.
For steps on how to create a USB recovery drive, go to Create a recovery drive.
To fix the drive right-click This PC in Windows 8.x or 10, or the Computer icon in Windows 7 and select Manage.
That opens up the built-in Computer Management utility.
You first get a recovery program and install it on your PC, connect your USB drive, then let the software scan your disk to look for recoverable items. It's a third-party formatting utility in case Windows internal formatting feature doesn't work. Just download it on your Windows PC, select the USB drive, choose desired file system you wish to format (e.g.
FAT32, ex-FAT), and you are good to go.: recover your lost data again (if you have).
This info is stored in a dedicated recovery partition on your device.
If your Surface won’t start, or if the recovery info has been removed, you can use your USB recovery drive to access recovery tools and solve problems.
If you didn't create a USB recovery drive and you can't access your Surface to create one, you can download the files you need to get your Surface working again—see Download a recovery image for your Surface.