Hyper-V on Microsoft Surface failed to boot

On ARM-based Windows hosts (like the Snapdragon X processors), Hyper-V VMs behave differently compared to Intel/AMD hosts. A common symptom reported by others is that the VM never boots from ISO/VHD/VHDX and jumps directly to PXE boot because it doesn’t detect a valid bootable device or isn’t using a compatible boot media.

Make sure the ISO or VHDX is an ARM64 build (either Windows on ARM or a Linux ARM64 release). x86/x64 ISOs won’t boot on an ARM Hyper-V host.

On Hyper-V Manager for ARM machines, you must use a Generation 2 VM (UEFI) — ARM Hyper-V doesn’t support Generation 1 on these devices.

Firmware > Boot Order: DVD drive / Virtual hard disk first, network adapter last.

Secure Boot: Try both on and off.

You may consider alternatives like WSL2 or ARM-friendly hypervisors for Linux needs.

On Surface Laptop 7 with Snapdragon (Windows on Arm), Hyper-V can run only Arm-based guest operating systems. x64 Windows 10 or other non-Arm distributions cannot boot as VMs and will typically fall back to PXE/network boot, which matches the behavior described.

Key points and actions:

1. Guest OS architecture
   • Windows on Arm hosts support only Arm/Arm64 guest OS images.
   • A standard x64 Windows 10 ISO will not boot as a Hyper-V guest on this device, regardless of boot order or Secure Boot settings.
   • Use a Windows 11 on Arm ISO instead of Windows 10 x64 if testing Windows guests. See the Windows on Arm ISO guidance for creating media.
2. Use correct Windows on Arm media
   • Obtain a Windows 11 Arm ISO as described in the Windows 11 Arm ISO overview.
   • Attach that ISO to the Hyper-V VM and boot from it.
   • For devices with Snapdragon X Series processors (such as Surface Laptop 7), the VM can boot from the ISO without additional drivers, but full functionality in a physical install requires drivers from Windows Update.
3. Secure Boot and firmware
   • Surface Laptop 7 supports Secure Boot and virtualization out of the box; virtualization is already enabled on Surface devices and Secure Boot is supported on Arm-based Surface.
   • Disabling Secure Boot in firmware is not required to run supported Hyper-V guests and will not make x64 guests work on an Arm host.
4. Deployment/boot tooling notes
   • Surface Laptop 7 supports Network Boot (PXE) and Operating System Deployment, but those apply to physical deployment, not to bypassing the Arm-only limitation for Hyper-V guests.

To resolve the issue, create new Hyper-V VMs using Arm-compatible operating systems (for example, Windows 11 on Arm) instead of Windows 10 x64 or other non-Arm distributions. The PXE-over-IPv4 fallback will persist as long as the attached boot media is not a valid Arm64 boot image.

References:

• Deploy, manage, and service Arm-based Surface devices
• Windows 11 Arm ISO files overview
• Enable Virtualization on Windows
• Windows 11 and Secure Boot