Surface Book Battery 1 Not Present

Question

Hello,

I purchased my Surface Book in 2016 and it has been working perfectly until the past few weeks. The tablet battery (1) says it's "Not Present" and isn't charging and the keyboard battery is charged completely. Because of this, it won't allow me to detach the tablet, which isn't my biggest concern. I only get 3-4 hours off the keyboard battery which is difficult as a college student. 

I have tried the UEFI boot restart like mentioned in previous articles, restarting the laptop normally, flipping the charger around in the port and wiping it down, running the diagnostic tool, and the power trouble shoot in settings. 

Unfortunately my warranty has expired since then, so please advise me in anyway possible!

Thank you!

Answer 1

Hi,

I have exactly the same issue. Purchased in 2016 and the exact same battery problem (battery 1 not present) when it is just out of warranty.

Ruz San - the instructions you linked are either slightly wrong or out of date.

After downloading the Recovery Image you are directed to Using a Surface USB recovery drive.

The instructions given are:

1. Make sure your Surface is turned off and plugged in, and then insert the USB recovery drive into the USB port.
2. Press and hold the volume-down button while you press and release the power button.
3. When the Microsoft or Surface logo appears, release the volume-down button.
4. When prompted, select the language and keyboard layout you want.
5. Select Troubleshoot , and then select Recover from a drive . If prompted for a recovery key, select Skip this drive at the bottom of the screen.

Point 2 doesn't work. On a Surface Book the volume down whilst turning on doesn't work (or at least it doesn't on mine). You have to go to "Recovery Settings" and click "Restart now" under "Advanced start-up".

Point 5 and the picture listed on the above help web page is wrong. This is what you get:

Clicking troubleshoot gives:

You will notice there is no Recover from a drive option.

Clicking on Advanced options gives:

I have tried System Image Recovery, but it does not work. It doesn't recognise the USB. I have tried with 3 different images on different USB sticks.

I'm afraid it is just another example of Microsoft providing poor/incorrect support and avoiding owning up to the issue.

Anyway, Nethra hopefully this will help:

It sounds like you have the same battery issue as me. The batteries are glued in. With use/heat they swell and the connections become loose. This is a manufacturing defect that microsoft refuse to acknowledge (plenty of info on google); if you are in the UK like me they will charge you £500 for a replacement. The replacement won't fix the underlying fault, and they only give a 90 day warranty, so it is likely that the problem will happen again.

You can test the connections by 'twisting' the top of the tablet part whilst the Surface Book is on charge. You might find that with a bit of fiddling the battery starts to charge (see the pic below where I'm bending the top of the screen back), but once you let go it will stop charging.

In summary/TLDR:

The battery connections are loose. Microsoft won't fix it. In future do what I'm going to do and buy elsewhere.

Answer 2

I have this same issue, and twisting it or squeezing the screen in the horizontal center and slightly towards the top (where the battery connections are) make the battery show up. Could you direct me towards some of this "plenty of info on google" though? This is literally the first time I've seen someone else mention this issue after months of searching and would like to see if anyone has come up with some sort of workaround. I was thinking maybe I could open up the screen and shove a piece of paper or something in there to put pressure on the connectors.

Answer 3

I don't think these refurbished units will ever work properly. I am very dissapointed with Microsoft surface book and their service. Charging another $800 for refurbished tablet which will not last long.

Answer 4

Unfortunately this seems to be a somewhat common issue with our Surface Book laptops. We have the same issue with ours too.

In our case we were in the middle of installing Windows Updates and charging the battery at the same time on October 10th (it hadn't been updated for a few weeks) when we noticed it suddenly stopped charging so we knew our issue was related somehow to the updates. In our case Battery 1 was still present initially, but after being at 0% for some time it disappeared so it sounds like the problems discussed here are all related. Note Microsoft was able to make it reappeared again but have not been able to resolve the charging issue. Anyway here are the details...

Looking through the logs carefully (knowing the date it stopped working helped) we noticed there were a number of firmware updates that attempted to install directly before it stopped charging initially. These firmware updates included modifying how the battery behaved (enabling a UEFI control to limit battery charging, etc.) and updates to the base firmware that interacted with the battery firmware. We also could see it failed to install both of them during the first attempt, coinciding precisely to when it stopped charging, but even after supposedly "succeeding" (one at a time, but eventually both), the batteries still no longer would charge. Something was now "broken" in the way the base and battery communicated with each other and/or managed charging the battery.

I tried everything I could find suggested online, including messed around with uninstalling and reinstalling battery drivers, etc. and nothing helped. We also discovered that even though the power connector would sometimes flash for a period of time that the batteries were actually still discharging (percentage decreasing over time).

After several hours I opened a Windows Update tech support inquiry with Microsoft and they messed around remotely until they completely flattened the batteries and the laptop shutdown without resolution.

I then discovered you could use a pin to manually release the screen (tablet portion) and if you connected the charger directly to the center of the base of the screen that the small battery in the screen would still charge (in our case anyway). Attaching the base after charging the screen's battery would provide about 2 hours of use with the keyboard, although the GPU in the keyboard no longer worked (due to requiring power directly from the battery in the base for it to work).

After 2 months messing around with Microsoft tech support (escalating to tier 3) and with them confirming the failure aligned directly with the installation of the updated firmware, they gave up. It sounds like they will be sending us a replacement base as their resolution but we haven't received it yet.

I've been researching things on my own as well and discovered:

1. There are hundreds of forum postings discussing recent battery charging issues with the Surface Book. Almost all starting in the late August to November time frame and right around the time that several firmware updates were installed (including specifically the update that enables limiting charging of the battery in the UEFI settings).
2. Unlike older PCs and laptops, firmware on these laptops is delivered through the "Device Manager" as a special firmware device (which actually is not a device driver at all; it is just a way to load the updated firmware into the operating system and then the OS combined with the UEFI (BIOS replacement) will handle installing it). You can read more technical details about this at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/bringup/firmware-update or https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/bringup/windows-uefi-firmware-update-platform
3. You can download all of the released firmware versions for all of the hardware modules through this link (includes both drivers and firmware updates): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49497
4. These special "firmware" devices are used by the operating system to check the current firmware version and if newer than reportedly installed and battery level above 40%, they will load the new firmware into what is known as a UEFI update capsule (which is essentially persistent memory that doesn't get erased during a reboot) and upon the next boot the UEFI pre-boot environment will go through the process of actually installing the updated firmware into the hardware as requested. Depending on the UEFI version supported by the PC/laptop, there are different "update capsule" storage locations, including with version 2.4 and newer, the option to use a specific folder on the hard drive (/EFI/UpdateCapsule).
5. Unfortunately if you install an older version of firmware into Device Manager (which Microsoft Tech Support kept trying over and over), it does nothing if the firmware installed is a previous version than actually installed in the hardware module.
6. If you do install a newer version of firmware I discovered you can get around the 40% battery level requirement to install it by uninstalling the actual device driver for the battery - BUT if you are trying to install updated battery firmware, the OS will not load the firmware update into the UEFI capsule (because the OS doesn't see the battery...).

After well over a month of "tech support", Microsoft Tech "Tier 3" Support eventually concluded that the operating system was designed to only deploy newer versions of firmware and if you install older versions into Device Manager the operating system just ignores it. At that point Microsoft kept telling us "they were working on a solution", but after another month they gave up.

Since we knew the issue was related to installing (or failing to install) new firmware, I kept asking if Microsoft could provide a way to reinstall older firmware that worked or could force the latest firmware to reinstall while also resetting parameters that might affect the firmware's performance. Although Microsoft Tech Support insisted there are no known methods, tools or registry setting(s) that can be used to enable older versions of firmware to be reinstalled or to force the current firmware to be reinstalled again (to repair a corrupt installation) I found the following:

1. If you know what you are doing (or install Linux) there are ways to read the UEFI's ESRT table to figure out the GUID that identifies the hardware with the corrupt firmware that you want to repair and you can use Linux software or manually deploy the firmware update using the UEFI update capsule. Unfortunately while I was able to read how people had done this, it is totally over my head.
2. Microsoft has actually provided special registry settings that enable installation of older firmware and reinstallation of firmware. These are intended to be used by firmware software developers but can be used to repair corrupt firmware if you know what you are doing. The following web page https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/bringup/firmware-update-status talks about creating the registry key "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FirmwareResources{GUID}\Policy" where {GUID} needs to be replaced with the unique number for the hardware you want to reinstall firmware for. If you can find software to read the ESRT table and find the GUID for the hardware with the corrupt firmware (in my case the battery and base), you can apparently add the REG_DWORD "Policy" with a value of 1 which will enable downgrading firmware and reinstalling it. Unfortunately I didn't figure out how to read the ESRT but that was my next step.
3. Today I discovered that 6 days ago Microsoft released a package of "Surface Tools" that include specialized tools for managing all sorts of things, including apparently firmware. These tools can be downloaded at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46703 . I haven't tried them yet.

I'm sorry I wasn't able to provide an actual solution, but you might be able to use the above information (combined with someone well versed with computer hardware and software) to fix the problem (please share with everyone if you do succeed). Your other option is to dig through your log files (both "Event Viewer" and your Windows Update log contain details on updates), find proof that the problem was caused by a Windows Update trying to install new firmware, open a support request with Microsoft's Tech Support, and convince them to send you replacement hardware with functional firmware installed (hopefully it will not become corrupt with another firmware update...).

Good luck everyone.

Answer 5

Hello,

I tried everything with no improvement, so i ended up manually detaching the tablet by inserting a paperclip in the 6th vents. I plugged fhe PSU into the bottom of the tablet, and it turned on but still says no battery present. I wiped every connection down as well. It’ll shut down once I unplug it. 

Please advise,

Nethra