Surface Pro3 - Crashing on waking with the docking station connect to an external monitor

Hello Harrat

Sorry to hear you are having trouble with your Surface Pro 3.

• When did this start happening? 
• Can you manually confirm that all updates are installed? 
• Does use of any app or function seem to trigger this? 
• How often does this happen?
• Take a look at Device Manager.  Any banged out, or Other devices?

Let us know what is happening.

Best regards

Thanks for the reply! 

The surface started behaving like this a week ago.  I believe now that this is a result of poor shutdown behavior rather than poor startup behavior.

The sequence is this.  After using the surface, I'll shutdown the system (not sleep, nor hitting the power button).  The screen goes black and when I turn it back on, the surface logo pops up, but I get no spinner, and it hangs there.  Eventually I'll see the driver_state failure.  Or I can preempt it by forcing the full power off by holding the power button and volume up.

When I boot after the full power cycle, the surface boots up normally and promptly as expected.  I thought about utilizing sleep instead of full shutdown instead, and found that if I hit start-> power-> sleep, instead of shutdown, nothing happens at all.  

I need to comb the logs again, and see if I see any system errors.  When I looked through the first time, there was nothing standing out.  There were a couple time related issues, which reminds me that if left off for a while, the tablet seems to lose its ability to hold time.  I'll boot it up and it will be off by a day or more.  

I use a docking station with the tablet.  Now that I think about it, this has been happening since I've really started using the docking station regularly.  I think that I need to see if the same behavior occurs when shutting down out of the tablet.

When I get home I'll check the device manager for banged out or other devices.  I'm wondering now if it's not seeing something with the dock station.

Oh and yes, I can confirm that all firmware and updates are installed.  I made sure to do that immediately. 

Harrat

Using a brand new Surface Pro 3 i7 and now 3rd Surface Pro 3 Dock.

The 1st 2 Docks had significant issues with recognizing an external monitor when re-docking or waking from a sleep while docked. I tried both Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter and also to HDMI with the same results.  I did extensive tests with the Surface and could get the ext. monitor recognized sometimes and fail sometimes with the following scenarios tried multiple times with different results regularly:

Powered On before docking ... Powered On after docking ... Wake up from sleep while docked ...

and maybe some scenarios I don't remember.

My conclusion was that the 1st 2 Docks would not be suitable for reliable consistent output to an external monitor.  My 3rd Dock has been a very different story.

1st, when I opened the package I noticed the white cloth-type wrapping the Dock was in was very different.  It was more of a wrap-around and not a bag -- actually a better design.  Wouldn't matter except this made me strongly believe I had a Dock from new lot number batch from manufacturing. (I had read in one forum someone that was asked his Dock's Serial Number and they sent him one presumably from a newer serial # batch.

2nd, this 3rd Dock has worked wonderfully well.  I have not found a way to force it to NOT recognize the external monitor after some 20 tests in different scenarios of docking, un-docking, sleeping, waking, etc.

3rd, I did discover one significant issue that I can 100% duplicate every time (in appx. 10+ tests).  If the Surface Pro 3 is POWERED OFF or SHUTDOWN while DOCKED, it ALWAYS hangs at the boot logo screen with "Surface" -- then the only resolution is to do a "hard" power off.

I can live with this by just making sure I un-dock before powering off.  I'm hoping this will get resolved in some update.  I hope this helps someone with similar problems.

noticed on

@jojopool - that last part is exactly the issue I'm experiencing. I Decided today to swap out the dock and see if that makes a difference (this sfc3 was working fine with another dock, previously. I bought another for my wife when i got a sfc3 for work and gave her the existing sfc). 

I bought the dock on amazon for Christmas, and i think i got it from a 3rd party vendor because it came already opened. Still looked new, but i should have known better. 

Im anticipating that the dock is the problem at this point after clarifying over the weekend that there's no problems with shutdown/bootups out of the dock. 

Thanks for the info!

I have narrowed things down to the Monitor or cable that is connected to the dock. As the issue does NOT occur when the monitor cable is unplugged from the dock station.

Like Jojopool, my issue only happens when in the dock, and it seems to happen 100% of the time.  Jojopool's description of the issues he faced lead me to think about the differences between my dock station and my wife's and the only real difference is the monitor.  

Her's is an LG 24en33tw-b (I think, going by memory, not sitting in front of it).  Mine are hans-sprees.  My monitors have hdmi, and hers is only vga or dvi.  I have a displaylink adapter and a displayport to hdmi changer, whereas she is just using a DP to DVI connector.  

I'm inclined to believe it's the monitor at this point, and not the cable.  It could be some issue with displayport to DVI conversion that maybe I wouldn't have with VGA.  I updated the driver of the monitor from generic, to the specific model driver, and still got the issue.

I will be testing a couple further things tonight:

I will plugin an older dell monitor that has vga/dvi, using the existing cable.  If i still have problems, I'm going to track down a DP to VGA cable and see if that helps.

If that doesn't work, I suppose I'm going to start looking for monitors unless someone has any suggestions.

There's no banged out devices in device manager.  The dmp is still obscure ACPI.sys like above.  The tablet works great except for booting up after shutting down while docked.  It also worked very well while docked in my dock station... which, as near as I can tell, is identical to the TWO I've tried on her desk.  No revision number differences.  Part numbers are the same, and serial numbers are not wildly different.

Anyone with another suggestion?

So - I tried with an old monitor... same problem.  Which kind of lead me back to believing it's the cable.

I have a DP to VGA cable that I tried out, and same problem.  

So... after all that, I decided to put the i5 SP3 on my dock station that I use for my i7.  This is the rig that I used as my primary setup for about 3 months with the i5, before handing it to my wife.  

Same problem.

I'm totally confused.  Recap of the symptoms:

Shutting down while in a dock station causes the next boot up to essentially fail.  I have to hard boot (volume up and power button) to get it to respond.  The tablet worked for months in a dock station with no problems.  I even reset the OS and tried it again thinking it was a bum driver... same thing.  I bought another dock station to test that out, and same thing.  I tested in a dock station setup that works flawlessly with my other SP3 and same thing.

However, if I unplug the monitor from the dock station, the problem doesn't happen at all.

Can someone suggest something else?  My wife is about ready to shoot me for the trouble...

Hello Harrat

• Is Surface domain joined? 
• Are you getting the same results with the official Surface video adapter? 
• Are you seeing the same results if you connect your display to the port on Surface instead of the Dock? 
• Are you running the standard software image plus updates, or something else? 
• Create a new Microsoft account for troubleshooting purposes, log in with it and see if the behavior persists.

Let us know of your results.

Best regards

No - Not domain joined.

I'm not using an official surface video adapter, though I never had problems until recently.

Yes, standard image.  When I reset it recently, I used "reset to factory settings", though I didn't force it to delete all files, but I did use the destructive re-install, not the one that keeps programs.

Edit -  I just created a local account.  After shutting down cleanly, booting up and logging in with the new local account, the same issue occurred. 

Also, with the monitor plugged into the SP3 directly, I didn't encounter the problem with multiple reboots and sitting in the docking station.  The issue ONLY occurs with the monitor plugged into the docking station directly.  And seemingly any docking station with a monitor plugged in. (I have another sp3 rig with other monitors that my SP3 works in, but this one does work in either one).

Harrat

Hello Harrat

Your other Surface Pro 3 setup works as expected in either dock, and this one does not work in either dock?

You may be facing a hardware problem with this device.  As you have already reset and applied all updates as part of troubleshooting, you may need to contact Support about your service options.

Best regards