Surface Pro X Boots to Battery Logo and Shuts Off

Question

hello, I have a relatively new Surface Pro X that is now exhibiting a strange issue.  It boots to the monochromatic Windows logo and then to a "depleted battery" symbol before powering off.  I have the unit plugged in to a known good Surface Dock and cant get past the screen.

I have tried two things:

1. I have held the power button for an extended amount of time (about a minute).  the unit will power cycle and go through the aforementioned icons a couple of times.
2. I have held volume-up and pressed and released the power button, but the UEFI menu does not come up.

So any suggestions on what is going on?

Answer 1

Thanks I did get a response directly from a Microsoft employee.

There is a 'handshake' or negotiation that occurs whenever you connect a Surface to the Surface Dock. This process requires power, so if there is no power on the device to complete this handshake then it will not connect and thus the Dock will not supply power to the device.

The Dock cannot charge a completely depleted device because there's not enough juice in the device when totally dead to be able to respond to the SurfLink requests for "what Surface device type are you" and/or "what power levels and accessories do you support?", and thus it won't charge the device until it can.  Once a device has been on a charger for a minute or three, you can plug in the Dock and it should continue charging at that point.

I have actually not seen or heard of this issue with other Surface Pro devices, but apparently this has always been the case.

Answer 2

So I have additional information about this.  In this case the user of the Surface Pro X let the battery run down lower than normal over the weekend and when they brought it in on Monday morning the dock would not charge or power the Surface Pro X.

I tested the same unit with my dock (that I use with an identical Surface Pro X).  It would not charge or get past the screen.

I got the travel charger that came with the Surface Pro X and the unit powered up and charged.  When the charge was around 20% I hooked the Surface Dock (that wasn't working previously) and it continued to charge the device.  So based on this it would seem that when the power level drops too low the travel charger is needed.

This is problematic in an Enterprise environment--we have 1,500 Surface Pro devices where a large number of users will leave the travel charger in their home-office and rely solely on the Surface Dock in the office.

Microsoft: can you look at this issue?  Maybe a firmware update on the Surface Dock will resolve this issue in the future.

Thanks,

Chris from Canada.

Answer 3

You probably might get better support if you contacted Surface for Business

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4037645

Answer 4

>Thanks I did get a response directly from a Microsoft employee.

>

Are you the same person (Christopher) that started this thread and was this

response from Business Support or???

Answer 5

Yes its me.  I could not log in with my original credentials for some reason.  I did not contact business support.  I got this response from a sales engineer that I work with regularly.  It seems like a definite response so I didn't see any need to open a Premier ticket.

Chris