I need some help deploying a Surface Pro 3 in SCCM 2012 SP1 (no CUs installed).
I know this is not supported, but I managed to cobble together a solution which so far has worked, I'm just having trouble with one specific unit. Here's the method I used to get to this point:
Use MDT 2013 to build and capture Windows 8.1 WIM which includes SP3 network drivers
Use SCCM 2012 SP1 to create boot image, injecting SP3 network drivers
Import WIM from MDT and use SCCM 2012 SP1 to create deploy task sequence
Task sequence installs Surface Pro 3 update MSI package since importing drivers to create proper driver package does not work
Other usual actions are performed such as enabling BitLocker, joining to domain, installing software packages, etc.
The deployment is done with boot media rather than PXE because I've had trouble getting it to work. In order to create the boot drive I had to combine files from the MDT boot drive and SCCM boot drive. The whole process is a Frankenstein combination of MDT and SCCM that is in no way supported, but surprisingly works. We're only doing this in a very limited pilot and so far all SCCM deployments have been done by me at my site.
My current problem is as follows. I had a new Surface shipped directly to a tech at another site. I distributed all the content needed to the local DP there and tried to walk him through the deployment. He created the boot drive, booted to it, diskparted the Surface, and selected the task sequence. After the WinPE environment is copied down from the network he's prompted to remove the drive and reboot. At this point it should reboot back into WinPE and continue with the deployment, that's how it works for me. But for him, it reboots directly to the BIOS if the USB drive is not inserted. I verified the hard drive has been partitioned and formatted properly and that the WinPE files have been downloaded. However it won't boot to the hard drive the way it's done on all the other Surfaces I've deployed with this method. The firmware is definitely outdated because it doesn't give the same number of boot order options, but I can't determine what version it is. The system date was also set to 2012, which I had to manually update in order for the task sequence to run at all. I'm stuck here, and I can't think of what to do next other than manually install Windows just to update the firmware and see if that helps.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, since I'd hate to have to boot up manually update firmware for every new Surface we deploy. Every other Surface that was deployed in SCCM was configured and updated manually first before we established this process, so this is the first true deployment from bare metal. I know the best answer will be to upgrade my SCCM environment to a supported version, but that's out of my hands and will not be happening overnight. In the mean time, I'm trying to do whatever I can to make this work. Thanks!