Issue with the Surface Pro Recovery Partition

I'm in the same boat. I am thinking seriously about doing this:
- save the recovery partition to USB stick, for if I ever want to wipe it to as it came in the box
- delete the existing 8.0 recovery partition
- build another bootable USB stick with Win 8.1 x64 and use that to do a clean install on the Surface Pro
- figure out how to turn that into a recovery partition
- save that recovery partition to a third USB stick

 

You can show the recovery partition using diskpart, open admin cmd and type:
diskpart

At the “DISKPART>” prompt type:

Code:

select disk 0
select partition 5
assign letter="R"
Exit

but first you will need to create windows 8.1 recovery image to replace the existing windows 8 recovery image
if you managed to do that, you can then replace it with this commands:

first one is just to ensure

Code:

reagentc /enable

backup existing image (if you want)

Code:

copy R:\RecoveryImage\Install.esd C:\BackupRecoveryImage\Install.esd

now delete it

Code:

del /s /f /q R:\RecoveryImage\Install.esd

copy the new one to recovery drive

Code:

copy C:\NewRecoveryImage\Install.wim R:\RecoveryImage\Install.wim

Restrict the Write and Modify permissions of the recovery image folder to the local Administrator Group

Code:

icacls R:\recoveryImage /inheritance:r /T
icacls R:\recoveryImage /grant:r SYSTEM:(F) /T
icacls R:\recoveryImage /grant:r *S-1-5-32-544:(F) /T

Register the new recovery image

Code:

Reagentc /setosimage /path R:\recoveryimage /index 1

Re-hide the recovery partition

Code:

diskpart
select partition 5 
remove

Verify the status and location of the recovery image

Code:

Reagentc /info

the output will be similar to:

Code:

Windows RE status: Enabled
Windows RE location: 
Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
Custom boot key scan code: 0x0
Recovery image location: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition5\RecoveryImage
Recovery image index: 1
Custom image location:
Custom image index: 0