I Purchased few weeks ago the Microsoft Surface Pro tablet, its a very nice production tablet that really enables remote users to run their production applications and workloads. There are still some room of improvement to get promoted as the number one choice of tablets for business users. From my point of view the three main things that need improvement are the Battery Life, 3G/4G connectivity option and better Camera.

Surface Pro comes with windows 8 Professional which is very nice and allows you to join your corporate network however it lacks a great feature which is Direct Access ! So I decided to turn it to fully productive device and install windows Enterprise on it. Its very simple as if you are building a new normal fresh computer.

I formatted the Surface drive however I kept the recovery image (for any future need), after finishing Windows Enterprise I installed the latest Surface Pro Firmware and Driver Pack http://www.microsoft.com/en-eg/download/details.aspx?id=38826

Finally I got my DirectAccess working on my Surface. That was really an exciting moment. Th next challenge was joining my domain MBAM/Bitlocker policy. Our MBAM / Bitlocker policy requires the use of a PIN while booting the computer. When the MBAM encryption wizard started I got the error 0x803100B7 Group Policy settings require the creation of a startup PIN, but a pre-boot keyboard is not available on this device and by checking the event viewer the following details were provided as per attached image

To Fix this issue we need to change/enable few settings in the Surface Local Policy.
Note: In order to use the Pre-authentication you need to have a Keyboard attached to the surface during the boot, You may use the Surface Touch/Type Keyboard or any external Keyboard connected to the USB port.
  1. Type GPEDIT.MSC in the Run bar to access the local Group Policy Editor
  2. Drill down to Computer Configuration – Administrative Templates – Windows Components – BitLocker Drive Encryption – Operating System Drives
  3. Enable both “Require Additional Authentication at Startup” and “Enable use of BitLocker authentication requiring preboot keyboard input” – Check below image.

 

After that restart the Bitlocker Management Client Service to kick in back the MBAM wizard which should complete normally without any problem.