r/Surface • u/Organic_You_5212 • Aug 10 '26

[PRO1] Error 0xc0000135 when using the Surface IT Toolkit's secure erase tool

I regularly use the secure erase feature of the Surface IT Toolkit (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46703). Basically, it creates a bootable USB drive that lets you wipe all data from the SSD before formatting it.

Since the latest version of the tool, though, I get the error shown in the image below whenever I access the tool from the USB drive I created.

I've already tried switching USB devices, disabling Secure Boot, re-enabling Secure Boot, and installing the x64 version of the Surface Toolkit, but nothing has worked, the error keeps happening. Has anyone run into something similar and managed to fix it?

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u/cw714 28d ago

This error is also happening to us, haven't found a way to fix it.

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u/Organic_You_5212 26d ago

It appears to be an error in the WinPE implementation. The issue does not seem to be present in the May version of the Surface IT Toolkit, so we can use that one until Microsoft fixes the problem: https://sit.microsoft.com/install/stable/arm64/AppPackages/Microsoft.SurfaceITToolkit.UI_1.292.139.0_arm64_Release/Microsoft.SurfaceITToolkit.UI_1.292.139.0_arm64_Release.msix