I am having a weird problem with my wife’s Surface Pro 3.
She used to use it daily and never had any issue. She now has a desktop and only uses the tablet occasionally on trips.
The first time the tablet was left unused for several weeks, when I went to start it, it booted into the Bios, exiting/save the Bios would just go back to it.
I tried a number of things, including disabling trusted platform and secure boot, and eventually succeeded to get it to fully boot. Did all the updates, re enabled trusted platform and secure boot, and used the tablet for a couple of days without any more problems.
The second time, the tablet sat unused for several month. Battery was still fine, and I did plug it in first before trying to start it, and the same thing happened, it only booted in the BIOS. This time no matter what I did, I could never get it to fully boot. I even booted on a USB windows recovery Key, tried repair, which failed, tried restoring the last restore point, failed. In the end the only thing that worked was to restore an old System image I had on an external drive.
After that it booted fine, I did all my updates, and used the tablet for a few days, all was back to normal.
So this time I decided to check it more regularly, I left it unplugged and shutdown for 10 days, started it (battery still full), and it booted in the Bios again, but this time when hitting exit and save, it did fully boot.
So it looks like the longer the tablet sits unused and unplugged the deeper a problem gets created.
I am going to try and turn off fast startup and see if that makes a difference. If not, next I will try to leave it shutdown but plugged in, to see if it is a Hardware issue of being unplugged for a while, or a Software issue of not being booted for a while.
Any ideas what could be going on?
Thanks